Seven Guitars

Seven Guitars
Written byAugust Wilson
CharactersLouise
Canewell
Red Carter
Vera
Hedley
Floyd Barton
Ruby
Date premiered1995
Place premieredGoodman Theatre
Chicago, Illinois
Original languageEnglish
SeriesThe American Century Cycle
Subjectan aspiring blues musician, a sick old man, three single women and the plight of African-American postwar urban poverty
GenreTragicomedy
Setting1940s; The backyard of a boardinghouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Seven Guitars is a 1995 play by American playwright August Wilson. It focuses on seven African-American characters in the year 1948. The play begins and ends after the funeral of one of the main characters, showing events leading to the funeral in flashbacks. Seven Guitars represents the 1940s entry in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, a decade-by-decade anthology of African-American life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the twentieth century; Wilson would revisit the stories of some of these characters in King Hedley II, set in the 1980s.