About the Playwright

Lanford Wilson was born in 1937 in Lebanon, Missouri. He attended high school in a nearby town where his love for theater blossomed. After graduation, he worked many jobs outside of the theater field while most of his writing was done in his free time. He began his career writing short stories like most, but eventually realized his stories worked better written as plays. For that reason, he studied playwriting at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s.

 

Wilson’s most famous plays include Fifth of July, which received a Tony Award nomination for “Best Play,” and Talley’s Folly, which earned him another Tony Award nomination and the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1980. Talley’s Folly played on Broadway 286 times in New York City that year. He was notorious for using those around him as inspiration for his characters. He famously said, “Nobody’s safe around a writer.”

 

Wilson entered the Theater Hall of Fame in 2001 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. He passed away at 73 in March 2011.

 

His career was prestigious and impactful, as was the man himself. Jeff Daniels, who starred in several of Wilson’s productions, remarked, “He demanded excellence, hated hypocrisy, despised mediocrity, and loved life. He adored work that mattered, that meant something, that counted.”