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    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone"
    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone"
    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone"
    Ebook45 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535826525
    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone"

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      A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" - Gale

      1

      Joe Turner's Come and Gone

      August Wilson

      1986

      Introduction

      August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, first produced in 1986 by the Yale Repertory Theatre, was published in the United States in 1988. The play was inspired both by the 1978 Romare Bearden artwork, Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket, and the blues song, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. The song, which was recorded by legendary blues artist, W. C. Handy, was first sung by many estranged black women who had lost their husbands, fathers, and sons to Joe Turner—a plantation owner who illegally enslaved blacks in the early twentieth century. Joe Turner's Come and Gone is the third play in Wilson's ten-play historical cycle, in which the playwright is chronicling the African-American experience in the twentieth century by devoting a play to each decade. Joe Turner's Come and Gone represents the 1910s.

      Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the play examines African Americans' search for their cultural identity, following the repression of American slavery. For Herald Loomis, this search involves the physical migration from the South to Pittsburgh in an attempt to find his wife. Pittsburgh was one of the many urban areas in the North that other blacks migrated to in the 1910s, in an effort to flee the discrimination they faced in the South, while attempting to find financial success in the North. Herald's search for his identity, represented as his song, is unsuccessful until he has embraced the pain of both his own past and the past of his ancestors, and moved on to self-sufficiency. A copy of the play can be found in August Wilson: Three Plays, published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 1994.

      Author Biography

      Wilson was born as Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Wilson's white German father largely deserted the family shortly after the playwright was born, and Wilson's mother, Daisy Wilson Kittel, was forced to support her large family by working a number of cleaning jobs. Daisy married David Bedford, an African-American man, when Wilson was an adolescent. Bedford moved the family to a mostly white suburb, where they experienced extreme racial intimidation. Although Daisy encouraged the playwright and his five siblings to pursue an education, the racist treatment he received in the formal school system encouraged Wilson to drop out as a teenager. Instead, Wilson educated himself in his local library, focusing mainly on black writers.

      In 1965, at the age of twenty, Wilson moved into a rooming house with a group of black intellectuals, and began publishing his poetry in several small periodicals. Wilson was profoundly affected by the Black Power movement in the 1960s, and cofounded the Black Horizons on the Hill Theater in Pittsburgh in 1968 to show his support. The theater, which was in operation until 1978, provided a medium for Wilson and others to raise awareness of African-American culture and issues. In 1978, Wilson

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