How long does it take to read The Piano Lesson?
The Piano Lesson by August Wilson takes about 1 hour 59 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 1 hour 59 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1990. 108 pages, about 29,700 words.
4 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 3 hours 18 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 1 hour 59 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 14 minutes |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.
Subjects: Drama, African Americans, Nineteen thirties, Brothers and sisters, Sharecroppers, African American families
