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Paule Marshall
A Writer’s Life
Growing up in World War II–era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929–2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature ― bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou ― Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked.
In this elegant literary biography, distinguished scholar of African American literature Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer’s papers, including her newly discovered unpublished memoir, and scores of interviews with family and friends to give us the first account of Marshall’s life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her work.
Beginning with her 1959 debut, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story set among Barbadian immigrants and African Americans in Brooklyn, and moving through her later works set in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, Marshall’s novels chart the diasporic life that Marshall herself lived, defined by Black women’s experiences, an unapologetic and sometimes queer sexuality, and the history of the African diaspora. Despite the lush and finely observed inner lives of her heroines, however, Marshall was famous for tightly guarding her own privacy, and it is this enigma―Marshall’s deeply expressive writing versus her guarded public exterior―that Washington draws out.
Here is the first look at a prescient, brilliantly talented writer, a complex and fascinating woman, whose fiction single-handedly stages a reverse middle passage that extends from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa.
“This is the first full biography of Paule Marshall, and I can’t think of a better person to write it. Complemented by her deep research and expert literary analysis, Mary Helen Washington’s 40-plus-year friendship with Marshall offers an extraordinary perspective on Marshall’s life and work.”
“The dynamic life of celebrated and award-winning novelist Paule Marshall (1929–2019) is given a long overdue spotlight in this illuminating new biography by scholar Washington (The Other Blacklist, 2014), a friend of the writer.
Marshall’s life is fascinating, beginning with her early years in Brooklyn as the child of a hard-working mother and ambitious father, immigrants from Barbados, through the publication of her seminal 1959 novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (a foundational work of Black feminist literature), and continuing through her long career as a novelist and educator.
Seamlessly blending insights from the author’s fiction with her private papers, unpublished memoir, interviews with friends and family, and her own personal memories, Washington does a stellar job of illustrating the impact of pivotal life events on the author’s work.
Writing of an especially influential trip Marshall made to Barbados, she succinctly connects the dots: “If the Barbados visit exposed Paule’s inner conflicts, it also ignited a lifelong desire to unite the two cultures, African American and Caribbean, in her writing and in her life.” The task of deconstructing the life of the famously, fiercely private Marshall is handled with aplomb in this insightful look into the life and work of a brilliant writer.”