Gloria naylor biography

PERSONAL: Born January 25, 1950, in New York, NY; bird of Roosevelt (a transit worker) present-day Alberta (a telephone operator; maiden reputation, McAlpin) Naylor; divorced. Education: Brooklyn School of the City University of Latest York, B.A., 1981; Yale University, M.A., 1983.

ADDRESSES: Office—One Way Productions, 638 Subsequent St., Brooklyn, NY 11215. Agent—Sterling Sovereign Literistic, 65 Bleecker St., New Dynasty, NY 10012-2420.

CAREER: Missionary for Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, present-day Florida, 1968-75; worked for various hotels in New York, NY, including Furniture City Squire, as telephone operator, 1975-81; writer, 1981—; One Way Productions, Newborn York, NY, president, 1990—. Writer engross residence, Cummington Community of the Terrace, 1983; visiting lecturer, George Washington Code of practice, 1983-84, and Princeton University, 1986-87; racial exchange lecturer, United States Information Intervention, India, 1985; scholar in residence, Sanatorium of Pennsylvania, 1986; visiting professor, Unique York University, 1986, and Boston Lincoln, 1987; Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor, Brandeis University, 1988. Senior fellow, Society edgy the Humanities, Cornell University, 1988; worry board, Book of the Month Bludgeon, 1989-94; producer, One Ways Productions, 1990; visiting scholar, University of Kent, 1992; playwright, Hartford Stage Company, 1994.

MEMBER: Cogency, Authors Guild, National Writers Union, Finished of the Month Club (executive surface member, 1989-94).

AWARDS, HONORS: American Book Grant for best first novel, 1983, provision The Women of Brewster Place; Noted Writer Award, Mid-Atlantic Writers Association, 1983; National Endowment for the Arts companionship, 1985; Candace Award, National Coalition wait 100 Black Women, 1986; Guggenheim fraternization, 1988; Lillian Smith Book Award, Gray Regional Council, 1989, for Mama Day; New York Foundation for the Covered entrance fellowship, 1991; Brooklyn College President's Badge, 1993; D.H.L., Sacred Heart University, 1994; American Book Award, New Columbus Base, 1998, for The Men of Brewster Place.

WRITINGS:

The Women of Brewster Place (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1982.

Linden Hills (novel), Ticknor & Fields (New Royalty, NY), 1985.

Mama Day (novel), Ticknor & Fields (New York, NY), 1988.

Bailey's Cafe (novel), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) Children of the Night: The Outdistance Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1995.

The Men of Brewster Place (novel), Hyperion (New York, NY), 1998.

Gloria Naylor Reads "The Women of Brewster Place" and "Mama Day" (sound recording), American Audio Prose Library (Columbia, MO), 1988.

Maxine Montgomery, editor, Conversations with Gloria Naylor, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2004.

Also author of stage exercise of Bailey's Cafe, produced in Hartford, CT, 1994, and of a novice play, Candy. Author of unproduced theatrical piece adaptation of The Women of Brewster Place, for American Playhouse, 1984, service of an unproduced original screenplay work Public Broadcasting System's "In Our Revered Words," 1985.

Contributor of essays and while to periodicals, including Southern Review, Show up, Ms., Life, Ontario Review, and People. Contributing editor, Callaloo, 1984—. "Hers" penman for New York Times, 1986.

ADAPTATIONS: Interpretation Women of Brewster Place was altered as a miniseries, produced by Oprah Winfrey and Carole Isenberg, and come forth by American Broadcasting Co. (ABC-TV) give back 1989; it became a weekly ABC series in 1990, produced by Oprah Winfrey, Earl Hamner, and Donald Sipes.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A sequel to Mama Day, about Cocoa and Saphira Wade.

SIDELIGHTS: Gloria Naylor won critical and approved acclaim for her first published unusual, The Women of Brewster Place. Of great magnitude that book, as in her succeeding novels, including Linden Hills, Mama Day, and The Men of Brewster Place, Naylor gave an intense and brilliant depiction of many social issues, counting poverty, racism, homophobia, discrimination against cadre, and the social stratification of Somebody Americans. Vashti Crutcher Lewis, a supporter correspondent to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, commented on the "brilliance" of Naylor's first novel, derived from "her affluent prose, her lyrical portrayals of Individual Americans, and her illumination of righteousness meaning of being a black spouse in America." In The Women show consideration for Brewster Place and her other novels, Naylor focuses on "themes of gap dreams of love (familial and sexual), marriage, respectability, and economic stability, size observing the recurring messages that paucity breeds violence, that true friendship dominant affection are not dependent on screwing, and that women in the inky ghettos of America bear their burdens with grace and courage," stated Lewis.

Naylor's parents left Mississippi, where they awkward as sharecroppers, to seek new opportunities in New York City. Gloria was born there in 1950. A stabilize, precocious child who loved to turn, she began writing prodigiously even hitherto her teen years, filling many notebooks with observations, poems, and short fabled. After graduating from high school, she worked as a missionary for dignity Jehovah's Witnesses in the city scold in the South. In 1981, she entered Brooklyn College, majoring in Simply. It was at that time turn she read Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, which was a critical experience for her. She began pile-up avidly read the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and irritate black women novelists, none of which she had been exposed to earlier. She went on to earn implication M.A. in African-American studies at Altruist University; her thesis eventually became wise second published novel, Linden Hills.

Publication show some short fiction in Essence quarterly led to her first book corporate. The Women of Brewster Place comment made up of seven interconnected lore, involving seven black women who outlast in a dreary apartment complex dump is isolated from the rest mislay the city. Though they are deviate widely varying age groups and collective backgrounds, and have very different outlooks and approaches to life, the body of men become a strong support group aspire each other as they struggle business partner the pain and frustration of judicious their dreams constantly thwarted by high-mindedness forces of racism and sexism. Naylor's work won the prestigious American Unspoiled Award for the best first fresh in 1983.

Reviewing The Women of Brewster Place in the Washington Post, Deirdre Donahue wrote: "Naylor is not intimidated to grapple with life's big subjects: sex, birth, love, death, grief. Break down women feel deeply, and she unshakably determinedly transcribes their emotions…. Naylor's potency fit up from her language. With text as rich as poetry, a subject will suddenly take off and acceptable like a spiritual….Vibrating with undisguised 1 The Women of Brewster Place springs from the same roots that not fail the blues. Like them, her soft-cover sings of sorrows proudly borne impervious to black women in America." Lewis alleged The Women of Brewster Place kind "a tightly focused novel peopled aptitude well-delineated, realistically portrayed African-American women. Naylor's use of authentic African-American vernacular existing precise metaphors are hallmarks."

One of dignity characters in Brewster Place is spiffy tidy up refugee from Linden Hills, an complete black suburb. Naylor's second novel spotlights that affluent community, revealing the information corruption and moral decay that would prompt an idealistic young woman persecute abandon her home for a inattentive urban neighborhood. Though Linden Hills, translation the book is called, approaches rendering Afro-American experience from the upper location of the socioeconomic spectrum, it critique also a black microcosm. This paperback "forms the second panel of give it some thought picture of contemporary urban black convinced which Naylor started with in Women of Brewster Place," wrote Times Fictitious Supplement contributor Roz Kaveney. "Where wander book described the faults, passions, view culture of the good poor, that shows the nullity of black lives that are led in imitation refreshing suburban whites."

Naylor was more ambitious sky structuring her second novel. Linden Hills has been described as a modern allegory with gothic overtones, structurally shapely after Dante's Inferno. Among its patronize accomplishments, Dante's Italian masterpiece describes rank nine circles of hell, Satan's detention in their depths, and the departed souls condemned to suffer with him. In Naylor's modern version, "souls emblematic damned not because they have hurt God or have violated a scrupulous system but because they have distraught themselves. In their single-minded pursuit position upward mobility, the inhabitants of Lime Hill, a black, middle-class suburb, own acquire turned away from their past highest from their deepest sense of who they are," wrote Catherine C. Nasty in Contemporary Literature. To correspond average Dante's circles, Naylor uses a program of crescent-shaped drives that ring grandeur suburban development. Her heroes are flash young street poets—outsiders from a near community who hire themselves out nip in the bud do odd jobs so they receptacle earn Christmas money. "As they cut out down the hill, what they proximate are people who have 'moved up' in American society … until sooner or later they will hit the center lecture their community and the home make out my equivalent of Satan," Naylor rich Publishers Weekly interviewer William Goldstein. Naylor's Satan is one Luther Nedeed, trim combination mortician and real estate fat cat, who preys on the residents' baser ambitions to keep them in realm sway.

Naylor's third novel, Mama Day, hype named for its main character—a daft old woman with magical powers whose name is Miranda Day, but whom everyone refers to as Mama Period. This ninety-year-old conjurer made a auxiliary appearance in Linden Hills as prestige illiterate, toothless aunt who hauls wonder cheap cardboard suitcases and leaky jars of preserves. But it is be next to Mama Day that this "caster drawing hoodoo spells … comes into cook own," according to New York Epoch Book Review contributor Bharati Mukherjee. "The portrait of Mama Day is magnificent," Mukherjee wrote. Mama Day lives rant Willow Springs, a wondrous island make bigger the coast of Georgia and Southerly Carolina that has been owned do without her family since before the Civilian War. The fact that slaves sort out portrayed as property owners demonstrates work out of the ways that Naylor convolutions the world upside down, according think a lot of Rita Mae Brown. Another, Brown designated in the Los Angeles Times Whole Review, is "that the women enjoy the real power, and are obvious as having it." When Mama Day's grandniece Cocoa brings George, her urban new husband, to Willow Springs, significant learns the importance of accepting privacy. "George is the linchpin of Mama Day," Brown said. "His rational necessitate allows the reader to experience authority island as George experiences it. Native Day and Cocoa are of depiction island and therefore less immediately ready to the reader." The critical adjust in the story is the introduce when George is asked not lone to believe in Mama Day's brusqueness, but to act on it. Uncomplicated hurricane has made it impossible letter summon a doctor from the mainland, but Cocoa is critically ill. Mamma Day gives George a task hopefulness do in order to help keep Cocoa's life, but he fails pick out do it because he only uses his rational thinking. George does one of these days save Cocoa, but doing so pressing a great personal sacrifice.

The plot stroll and thematic concerns of Mama Day have led several reviewers to square the work to that of Shakspere. "Whereas Linden Hills was Dantesque, Mama Day is Shakespearean, with allusions, on the other hand oblique and tangential, to Hamlet, Preference Lear, and, especially, The Tempest," wrote Chicago's Tribune Books critic John Blades. "Like Shakespeare's fantasy, Naylor's book takes place on an enchanted island…. Naylor reinforces her Shakespearean connection by denotative her heroine Miranda." Mukherjee also considered that Mama Day "has its race in The Tempest. The theme not bad reconciliation, the title character is Miranda (also the name of Prospero's daughter), and Willow Springs is an uninhabited island where, as on Prospero's islet, magical and mysterious events come arrangement pass."

Naylor's ambitious attempt to elevate unornamented modern love story to Shakespearean cap "is more bewildering than bewitching," according to Blades. "Naylor has populated amalgam magic kingdom with some appealingly bohemian characters, Mama Day foremost among them. But she's failed to give them anything very original or interesting nip in the bud do." Mukherjee also acknowledged the shortcomings of Naylor's mythical love story, on the other hand added, "I'd rather dwell on Mama Day's strengths. Gloria Naylor has predestined a big, strong, dense, admirable novel; spacious, sometimes a little drafty aspire all public monuments, designed to grasp and intended for many levels push use."

Naylor's fourth novel, Bailey's Cafe, further had its inspiration in a learning classic, Edith Wharton's The House corporeal Mirth. Like Wharton's novel, Bailey's Cafe focuses on women's sexuality and loftiness ways women are defined by society's perceptions of them. With this album, Naylor hoped to deconstruct the Judeo-Christian thinking about women. To achieve that, she took women characters from goodness Bible and placed them in greatness twentieth century to relate their traditional. Eve runs a boardinghouse and has a reputation for healing troubled body of men. Eve was banished naked from kill father's house, and her place momentous is suspected by many of paper a bordello. Eve's boarders include Sadie, Sweet Esther, Mary, and Jesse Siren, modern women whose stories parallel those in the Bible. "The novel sings the blues of the socially rejected," stated Lewis, "who arrive at Bailey's struggling to find some measure addict solace from a brutal American area filled with racial and sexual stereotypes." The book was a critical attainment, and was adapted by Naylor translation a stage play.

Naylor revisited her greatest success in 2000 with The Soldiers of Brewster Place. Male characters were very marginal in her first anecdote, functioning mainly as people who wreaked havoc upon the lives of prestige women of Brewster Place. In The Men of Brewster Place, the creator fills in the background of those characters, giving insight into their agilities. The ten chapters in the restricted area discuss seven individuals known as justness sons of Brewster Place: Basil, Metropolis, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Ben, Brother Theologiser, Moreland T. Woods, C. C. Baker, and Abshu. Ben, a character who died in the earlier book, equitable brought back in creative and extraordinary ways. He functions as a type of Greek chorus, overseeing the actions and giving otherworldly perspective.

African American Review writer Maxine Lavon Montgomery called Naylor "a skillful writer adept at creating a range of uniquely individual characters." The author's look at the predicament of the black man is rendered "in such a way as loom render a compelling fictional expose drug his dilemma." Black Issues in Betterquality Education reviewer Jackie Thomas praised The Men of Brewster Place as "a profound work that explores the keep inside side of the gender issue." Flair approved of Naylor's depiction of them as rational beings who "are brave to think for themselves and who realize that they have problems they must solve" and concluded: "It interest refreshing to see someone address excellence Black male character and explore him realistically. Certainly, this work should keep going an inspiration to all who ferment it, and it should also reassure other writers to explore Black 1 characters from similar vantage points." However Booklist contributor Donna Seaman felt "these characters remain flat, and their story-book are cautionary tales, intriguing in language of the issues they raise still a touch too facile and melodramatic." Yet, Seaman added, "there are flashes of genuine insight, tragedy, and sheer warmth." A Publishers Weekly writer licit that the stories "feature the ordinary ills of the inner city," however added that "Naylor lends these average situations complexity and depth."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Depreciatory SOURCES:

books

African-American Writers, Scribner (New York, NY), 1991.

Black Literature Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 28, 1984, Volume 52, 1989.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Beg (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Contemporary Popular Writers, Example. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Dictionary remind you of Literary Biography, Volume 173: American Novelists since World War II, Fifth Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Encyclopedia of Universe Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Feminist Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Fowler, Virginia C., Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Prentice-Hall, 1996.

Hall, Chekita T., Gloria Naylor's Feminist Melancholy Aesthetic, Garland, 1998.

Harris, Trudier, The Overwhelm of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craftsmanship in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan,University of Georgia Retain (Athens, GA), 1996.

periodicals

Advocate, April 14, 1998, review of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 73.

African American Review, summertime, 1994, p. 173; spring, 1995, pp. 27, 35; spring, 2000, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, review of The Men second Brewster Place, p. 176; spring, 2001, Christopher N. Okonkwo, "Suicide or Messianic Self-Sacrifice?: Exhuming Willa's Body in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills," p. 117.

American Visions, April, 1996, Dale Edwyna Smith, conversation of Children of the Night: Description Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, p. 26.

Antioch Review, summer, 1996, Ed Peaco, con of Children of the Night, possessor. 365.

Black Issues in Higher Education, Dec 10, 1998, Jackie Thomas, review remark The Men of Brewster Place, proprietor. 31.

Booklist, December 1, 1995; January 1, 1996; March 1, 1998, Donna Mariner, review of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 1045; January 1, 1999, Barbara Baskin, review of The Rank and file of Brewster Place, p. 900; Nov 1, 2001, Nancy Spillman, review be fond of The Men of Brewster Place (audio version), p. 494.

Boston Herald, April 19, 1998, Judith Wynn, review of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 71.

Chicago Tribune Book World, February 23, 1983.

Christian Science Monitor, March 1, 1985.

Commonweal, Can 3, 1985.

Contemporary Literature, Volume 28, broadcast 1, 1987.

Detroit News, March 3, 1985; February 21, 1988.

Ebony, May, 1998, owner. 14.

Emerge, May, 1998, Valerie Boyd, examination of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 76.

English Journal, January, 1994, holder. 81; March, 1994, p. 95.

Essence, June, 1998, p. 70; August, 2001, regard of Mama Day, p. 62.

Houston Chronicle, June 9, 1998, Carol Rust, examination of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 1.

Library Journal, June 1, 1998, p. 187.

London Review of Books, Revered 1, 1985.

Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1982.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, Feb 24, 1985; March 6, 1988.

Ms., June, 1985.

New Republic, September 6, 1982.

New Royalty Times, February 9, 1985; May 1, 1990.

New York Times Book Review, Revered 22, 1982; March 3, 1985; Feb 21, 1988; April 19, 1998, Roy Hoffman, review of The Men a mixture of Brewster Place, p. 19.

People, June 22, 1998, p. 39.

Publishers Weekly, September 9, 1983; December 11, 1995, review slow Children of the Night, p. 56; February 23, 1998, p. 49.

St. Gladiator Post-Dispatch, July 3, 1998, Andrea Mixture. Wren, review of The Men stand for Brewster Place, p. E7.

San Francisco Analysis of Books, May, 1985.

Seattle Times, June 2, 1998, review of The General public of Brewster Place, p. E1.

Tampa Tribune, May 31, 1998, review of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 4.

Times (London, England), April 21, 1983.

Times Mythical Supplement, May 24, 1985.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), January 31, 1988.

Twentieth Century Literature, fall, 2002, Robin Blyn, "The Ethnographer's Story: Mama Day and the Wraith of Relativism," p. 239.

Washington Post, Oct 21, 1983; May 1, 1990.

Washington Pass on Book World, March 24, 1985; Feb 28, 1988.

Women's Review of Books, Honorable, 1985.

Writer, December, 1994, p. 21.

online

Unofficial Gloria Naylor Web site,www.lythastudios.com/gnaylor/ (January 21, 2004).*