As August Wilson told it, at 14 he walked into the Carnegie Library on Monongahela Street in Hazelwood, "on my way home from Louis Field with my basketball under my arm and changed my life: I discovered the Negro section with its 30 or so books. ... That gave me the proof that it was possible to be a writer. ... I wanted to see my book up there, too."

Now, his "book" is up there in style -- all 10 of them.

Theatre Communications Group has just published the uniform edition of what it calls "The August Wilson Century Cycle," a boxed set of the 10 individual plays that each takes place in a different decade of the 20th century. Often called the Pittsburgh Cycle because every play but one is set in Wilson's native Hill District, it has earned him a position alongside Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as the great theatrical chroniclers of the comedy and tragedy of our national life.

Wilson died Oct. 2, 2005, just 60 years old. But the handsome boxed set would gladden the man who once said, "I used to dream about being part of the Harlem Renaissance," and whose favorite honor, outweighing his two Pulitzers and scores of other awards and honorary doctorates, was the high school diploma given him in 1999 by his beloved Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

In general, TCG (the national trade association of not-for-profit professional theaters) has done Wilson proud with its design and editorial embellishments. The substantial box bears a contemplative picture of Wilson at his favorite New York address, the unpretentious coffee shop of the Edison Hotel. At 5 3/4 by 8 3/4 inches, in a serious dark gray binding with gold print, each hardbound play has a compact but solid feel.

The boxed set of 10 sells for $200, but individually the plays are priced at $25. That's steep. But new paperback versions to replace the previous trade paperbacks are promised soon -- at half that price or less, I hope, thinking of the thousands of students who will buy these volumes as Wilson becomes a curriculum staple in high school and college.

The dust jackets replace the trade editions' colorful designs by Romare Bearden and Wilson's wife, Constanza Romero, with sepia photographs -- roadside guitar players for "Seven Guitars," an Aunt Ester-like figure for "Gem of the Ocean," a son and partially seen father for "Fences." Only one photograph disappoints: an abstract pattern of train tracks for "Two Trains Running," which says nothing about the play.

But only the cover of "Radio Golf" has anything to do with the Hill. This striking photo by the Post-Gazette's Peter Diana shows men standing around a dilapidated, weed-bordered stretch of Centre Avenue that includes the building that used to be Lutz Meat Market. That's a significant place in "Two Trains," and Lutz is still engraved at its top, but unfortunately you can't see that in this version.

More important are the new introductions commissioned for each volume and a 16-page general introduction (printed in "Gem") by New Yorker drama critic John Lahr. It draws heavily on Lahr's fine 29-page, 2001 New Yorker profile, later reprinted in his "Honky Tonk Parade" (2005), for which a footnote tells us he interviewed Wilson for an enviable four months.

Lahr provides a summary of the main themes of Wilson's plays and how they might have arisen out of the experiences of his life, especially the crucial first 33 years in Pittsburgh. It also deals well with how he worked and some of what he said about his motives and goals. And Lahr spins many a compelling phrase: "the plays show high spirits as a form of heroics"; "the almost symphonic display of defiant personality is frequently counterpointed ... by a show of demented absence."

But in spite of the empathy and grace of Lahr's prose, there are small errors that, taken together, suggest speedy writing and too little copy editing. Most egregiously, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" (1984) was not "only the second African-American play [after "A Raisin in the Sun"] to be produced on Broadway." Lahr overstates the black population of the Hill in 1978. And he says that Wilson learned of Pat's Place "from Claude McKay's book 'Home to Harlem,'" whereas no one growing up on the Hill needed a New York writer to tell them about the popular cigar store, pool hall and numbers shop.

(There are more small glitches, but rather than let them bulk larger than they deserve in a favorable review, I gather them for real aficionados in an appendix, down below.)

One of the attractions of the introductions to individual plays is the variety of authors and approaches. They include four playwrights (Romulus Linney, Tony Kushner, Ishmael Reed and Suzan-Lori Parks), two actors (Phylicia Rashad and Laurence Fishburne), two critics (Frank Rich and Samuel G. Freedman, both of course from The New York Times), a director (Marion McClinton) and a novelist (Toni Morrison).

The biggest disappointment is Morrison's piece on "The Piano Lesson," marginally pompous with very little to say. The best is Kushner's on "Seven Guitars," full of speculation on the magic of the number seven. It's the longest, at 16 pages; at the other extreme is Linney's two pungent pages on "Joe Turner's Come and Gone."

As a group, they touch on many important issues, largely by writing about what interests them the most. Each also draws on the obvious reason they were chosen: Rich talks about his famous first encounter with Wilson's work at the O'Neill Theater Center in 1982; Rashad begins with having played Aunt Ester; McClinton uses his experience directing two of the 10 plays on their journeys to New York; and Freedman relies on his 1986 New York Times profile, repeating some of its errors (see also below).

Among those not chosen, I mainly miss Charles Dutton -- along, sadly, with Wilson's two greatest collaborators, director Lloyd Richards and producer Benjamin Mordecai, both deceased.

For "Radio Golf," this is the first publication of the final text, replacing the semifinal version in the November 2005 American Theatre magazine. It will take some time to figure out what sort of editing the other texts may have undergone, but on first blush, they seem based securely on the previous trade (not acting) editions, right down to occasional typos.

Having a uniform edition now makes it easier to calculate the play's lengths. The average is 93 1/2 pages. The shortest by far is "Jitney" at 77, followed by "Radio Golf" at 81; the longest are "King Hedley II" and "Piano Lesson" at 110 and 107.

The short, invariably vivid introductions Wilson provided for some of the plays are included. His foreword to "King Hedley II" turns up as an afterword. Also preserved are his well-crafted dedications to family members, friends and theater colleagues, which should be considered in the order the plays were written to get their full significance.

The plays and their rambunctious, heartbreaking characters and language belong first on stage. Some will become movies. But on the page, they will be perpetually in print, taking their place on the shelves where future writers may find life-changing inspiration.

Appendix: Nit-picking the Introductions -- further details for fans

I yield to no one in my admiration of John Lahr. His 2001 New Yorker profile of Wilson is by far the most penetrating biographical sketch we have, and it is largely free of the factual errors (or just plain guesses) that abound in many other profiles.

But for those who care, here is more detail on what seem to me errors in his general introduction to the whole cycle, moving from factual matters to those of interpretation. I realize that some are very minor, but they are part of a structure of fact. With Wilson dead, it seems more important to get the details of his life as right as we can. And where I am wrong in what follows, I hope others will set me right.

• "Ma Rainey" was not "only the second African-American play [after "A Raisin in the Sun"] to be produced on Broadway": depending how you define "play," there were maybe a half-dozen, including Joseph Walker's 1973 Tony-winning "The River Niger."

• Lahr says that in moving to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978, Wilson "went from a neighborhood that had 55,000 blacks to an entire state that had the same number": presumably that Pittsburgh neighborhood is the Hill, which in 1978 had about 22,000 inhabitants in all, mainly black; in 1950, it was about 53,000, but much more mixed ethnically. Or is Lahr using a total for all Pittsburgh, hardly a neighborhood?

• Lahr says, "From Claude McKay's book 'Home to Harlem', he learned of a cigar store and pool hall in his own neighborhood called Pat's Place." Granted that Wilson read a lot when young, it's unbelievable he was so young when he read McKay that he hadn't already heard of Pat's Place, where kids were regularly sent to fetch smokes or such for their parents. Surely everyone on the Hill knew of Pat's Place -- both the first one on lower Wylie, demolished in the 1950s for the new arena, and its successor, further up Wylie near Crawford Grill No. 2.

• Lahr says that by the time he was twenty, Wilson had "read his way through the local library." Actually, he had read extensively in three Carnegie libraries, starting with the Hill branch on Wylie Ave.; then the branch in Hazelwood, where he did "read through" the "30 or 40" (as he sometimes said) books in the Negro shelf; and then, after he dropped out of Gladstone High School in the 10th grade, the central library in Oakland, which is hardly a "local library" and which not even August Wilson could "read through," even metaphorically.

• In successive sentences Lahr says that "by the time Wilson was twenty" he had "buried his mostly unmourned father" and that "his best friend in those days was . . . Chawley Williams." The first is true only in a manner of speaking, because Wilson had little to do with Frederick Kittel's burial. As to the second, I don't think he first met Williams until he was 20.

• Lahr says that Troy ("Fences") "wants to win a promotion as the first black garbage-truck driver, but he can't read to get his license," which suggests that Troy doesn't get the promotion. Actually, he does, and when asked if he can drive, simply says yes and does.

• Lahr says that Hambone ("Two Trains") has "been given a chicken instead of the promised ham," but actually Hambone rejects the chicken and continues to insist on the ham.

• It's not quite true that Citizen Barlow ("Gem") "has to pay his entire wages for room and board to the mill that hires him" or that Youngblood ("Jitney") "can't get the down payment to buy a home" -- he does, and buys it.

• As a matter of emphasis, it's not that Boy Willie wants to purchase just "a farm," as Lahr says: he wants to purchase the very land on which his family were slaves. And Aunt Ester is not "central to many of the plays." She is central to the cycle as a whole, but she appears onstage (as a very central character) only once, in "Gem"; as an important offstage character in "Two Trains" and "King Hedley"; and as a memory (more vivid to us than to the characters) in "Radio Golf."

And more

In my commentary, I say that in his introduction to "Fences," Samuel G. Freedman "relies on his 1986 New York Times profile, repeating some of its errors." For example:

• On his first page, Freedman confuses Pat's Place with Eddie's and says he visited Wilson's sister, Freda Ellis, who was living in their childhood home at 1727 Bedford. The house was then uninhabitable; Freda lives near by.

• It seems to be Freedman who started the error about "55,000 blacks on the Hill."

• I don't think you can say, as Freedman does, that Wilson, born Frederick August Kittel, "selected his nom de plume in purely casual fashion, typing out all the possible variations." There was nothing casual about it, as any knowledge of Wilson's life makes clear.

• Freedman says that Wilson's mother, Daisy, married David Bedford in 1957. I doubt it.

But let me note that when Freedman's N.Y. Times piece appeared in 1986, it broke a lot of new ground. And he can spin a fine phrase, too: "the irreducible, willfully discomfiting anthracite blackness of works like 'Joe Turner's Come and Gone' or the recent 'Radio Golf.'" I love that "anthracite blackness" -- though surely it belongs most to "King Hedley II" and not to "Radio Golf," at all?

Seeing these glitches reminds me to keep my fingers crossed while working on my own Wilson book.