Helen Shaw nominated August Wilson's Century Cycle — 10 plays set in each decade of the 20th century — as the most American play for its comprehensive portrait of Black American life.
Where this was said
At 37:17 · chapter starts 36:53
The literary segment runs two tracks simultaneously. MJ Franklin, an editor at the Book Review, chooses Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' sprawling novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois for the way it weaves a contemporary girl's coming-of-age with her ancestors' lives on the land that became Georgia, demonstrating that American history is not a distant past but a living presence that shapes how people experience the present. Helen Shaw, chief theater critic, picks August Wilson's Century Cycle — ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century among Black families in Pittsburgh's Hill District — as a statement about what the African American experience was facing in the 20th century and what it was capable of repairing in the spirit. Both choices center Black American life as the essential American story.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' novel weaves a contemporary Black American girl's coming-of-age with the story of her ancestors on the land that would become Georgia and then America. MJ Franklin argues this convergence of timelines is the novel's deepest truth: American history is not the past, it is the present.
Ten plays. Ten decades of the 20th century. One loosely connected group of Black families in Pittsburgh's Hill District. Helen Shaw argues August Wilson's Century Cycle makes a statement no single play could: the totality of what Black America faced and what it was capable of repairing in the spirit.
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