From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Lanford Wilson is an American playwright who was born on April 13, 1937 in Lebanon, Missouri. He was raised in the Ozarks until, as a teenager, he moved to California to live with his father, from whom his mother had been long divorced. He began his career as a playwright in the early 1960s at the Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village with one-act plays such as Ludlow Fair, Home Free, and The Madness of Lady Bright. He soon moved to off-Broadway with Balm in Gilead in 1964 and The Rimers of Eldrich in 1965. Wilson was a founding member of the Circle Theatre Company which began in 1969. Many of his plays were first presented there, including The Hot L Baltimore, which won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award the Outer Critics’ Circle Award, and the Obie Award, and Fifth of July, which later had a successful production on Broadway. Wilson’s 1979 play, Talley’s Folly won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Other plays by Wilson include:
- The Gingham Dog (1968)
- Lemon Sky (1970)
- The Mound Builders (1975)
- A Tale Told (1981—later revised and renamed “Talley & Son”)
- Angels Fall (1982)
- Burn This (1987)
- Redwood Curtain (1993)
- Book of Days (2000)
