Gloria Naylor

Naylor, Gloria (b. 1950), novelist, essayist, screenplay writer, columnist, and educator. Gloria Naylor was born in New York City on 25 January to Roosevelt and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, who had recently migrated northward from their native Robinsonville, Mississippi. Having worked as cotton sharecroppers in Mississippi, her father became a transit worker for the New York City subway system and her mother a telephone operator. Naylor, who was a very shy child, grew up in New York City, where she lived until she graduated from high school in 1968.

From shortly after her graduation until 1975, Naylor worked as a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, and Florida. Eventually deciding that missionary life and the Jehovah's Witnesses were not for her, Naylor returned to New York City and attended college while working as a telephone operator in several different hotels. Although she studied nursing for a short time at Medgar Evers College, she soon decided to pursue a BA in English at Brooklyn College, from which she graduated in 1981. Next Naylor entered Yale University on a fellowship and received an MA in Afro-American studies there in 1983. Having published her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, in 1982, she wrote for her master's thesis at Yale what would become her second novel, Linden Hills (published 1985).

In 1983 Naylor's literary career took off mainly because of the attention she received for her first book. The Women of Brewster Place was granted the American Book Award for Best First Novel that year, and Naylor received the annual Distinguished Writer Award from the Mid-Atlantic Writers Association. In 1983 she also served as writer in residence at Cummington Community of the Arts and as a visiting lecturer at George Washington University. During the 1980s Naylor had jobs at numerous other institutions, including working as a cultural exchange lecturer in India for the United States Information Agency, and teaching at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Princeton, Boston, Brandeis, and Cornell. Naylor also received several prestigious awards, such as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985, the 1986 Candace Award from the National Coalition of One Hundred Black Women, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988, and the 1989 Lillian Smith Award.

Since Naylor began publishing in the early 1980s, she has produced five novels: The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988) Bailey's Cafe (1992), and The Men of Brewster Place (1998). In addition to these primary works, she has also published essays—including a column in the New York Times in 1986 and a scholarly piece, “Love and Sex in the Afro-American Novel,”which was published in the Yale Review in 1988—and has written several unproduced screenplays. Another important publication is “A Conversation”between Naylor and Toni Morrison, which appeared in the Southern Review in 1985. She edited Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1967 to the Present in 1995.

Naylor's first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, consists of the interrelated tales of seven African American women who all end up on a dead-end street in a northern ghetto. Ranging in age from their twenties to their fifties, these characters have often suffered greatly because of the insensitive behavior of men. The protagonist of the novel, Mattie Michael, has found disaster in just about every interaction she has had with a man. Although her father in rural Tennessee is sternly caring during her childhood, his reaction to her later pregnancy is violent. And her son, Basil, who Mattie spoils, betrays his mother when she puts up her house as collateral for his bail: his pretrial flight instead of facing murder charges forces her to move to Brewster Place.

Most of the other women in the novel also suffer male exploitation. For instance, although Etta Mae Johnson, Mattie's childhood friend, sometimes has control in her relations with men, Etta's lifelong dependence on them for support and identity leads to trouble. In addition, Lucielia Louise Turner (Ciel) reluctantly undergoes an abortion to try to hold onto her husband, who is threatening to leave. Indirectly resulting from the neglect created by this upheaval, their toddler daughter sticks a fork into an electrical outlet and dies. Ciel's horrified reaction almost kills her, but Mattie intervenes.

Other women exploited by men in The Women of Brewster Place include Cora Lee, whose addiction to having babies leads to her frequent and casual sexual encounters. But the most horrific incident of this sort in the novel occurs when Lorraine is raped by C. C. Baker and his gang of hoodlums. Because of the gang members’ homophobia regarding Lorraine's lesbian relationship with Theresa, they feel compelled to teach her a lesson.

Ben, the one partially positive male character in the novel, is nevertheless flawed by his excessive drinking and by his earlier passive complicity when his daughter was repeatedly taken advantage of sexually. Ironically, this relatively likable man is bludgeoned to death beside the Brewster Place wall by Lorraine when she is deranged after being raped. The novel ends when all the women cathartically destroy the wall that has cut them off from the rest of the city—and from their chances for better lives.

Naylor's second novel, Linden Hills (1985), is loosely based on Dante's Inferno, but the hell she creates is in a middle-class neighborhood. Controlled by the Lucifer-like Luther Nedeed, who is an undertaker, Linden Hills consists of a sloping spiral of streets that become more elite as one nears the bottom of the hill, where Nedeed lives. In a fated pattern of reproduction, several generations of nearly identical Luther Nedeeds are born in Linden Hills, with their primary purposes in life being to continue their lineage and to reign over the growing neighborhood.

During the contemporary time of the novel, Luther Nedeed presides over an affluent, middle-class community where “successful” African Americans essentially sell their souls in order to live there. Luther's grand scheme, however, is thwarted by his wife, Willa, who bears him a son according to plan, but this son is too pale to fulfill his role as his father's replica. Wrongly accusing Willa of infidelity with a white man, Luther locks her up in the cellar, which was originally a morgue, with their son, who eventually dies there. While trapped, Willa explores relics left by her predecessors and eventually learns to assert her right to exist. The resultant action, however, causes the destruction of the Nedeed house by fire and Willa's and Luther's death—all on Christmas Eve.

Meanwhile, two young men, Willie and Lester, journey around Linden Hills seeking odd jobs. Their interaction with the neighborhood residents reveals the hollowness of the rich, as well as the comparable depth of those less wealthy. Willie and Lester serve as Naylor's equivalent of Vergil and Dante as they traverse the hellish terrain of Linden Hills. This Dantean parallel is effectively developed, including the two poets’ escape over water (the moat around the Nedeed house) at the novel's end.

With her third novel, Mama Day (1988), Naylor has received the most praise. As the story of the title character and her great-niece, Ophelia (Cocoa) Day, this work fully develops Naylor's themes of magic, myth and family. Naylor superimposes the two settings of Willow Springs—an island off the coast between (but not in) South Carolina and Georgia—and New York City, thereby contrasting the philosophical differences between Cocoa and her husband, George Andrews. In a 1989 interview with Nicholas Shakespeare, Naylor said that her purpose in Mama Day was to analyze the makeup of individual belief, as well as what constitutes individual definitions of reality. During the course of the novel, she compares her depictions of magic and personal faith with the willing suspension of disbelief that all readers of fiction undergo.

Following a prologue that explains the history of Willow Springs, and which is narrated by the collective consciousness of the island itself, part 1 of the novel primarily consists of exchanges between Cocoa and George. Although George is already dead during the time of these narrated memories, he and Cocoa continue to commune from beyond the grave. Focusing on New York City, where Cocoa and George meet and eventually marry, part 1 also introduces Miranda (Mama) Day, the matriarch of Willow Springs, and her sister, Abigail, Cocoa's grandmother. Mama Day is a midwife, healer, root doctor, herbalist, and, if the reader chooses to interpret Naylor's ambiguous signals this way, a conjure woman.

Part 2 of Mama Day depicts the events that occur after George and Cocoa travel to Willow Springs. Following a tremendous storm, the bridge connecting the island to the mainland washes away. Cocoa then becomes dangerously ill, apparently as a result of poisoning and conjuring by Ruby, an intensely jealous woman. In order to save his wife, George must suspend rational thought and fully accept the mystical ways of the island. Although his love for Cocoa almost make him capable of this leap of faith, ultimately he cannot believe what the island and Mama Day demand of him. George's already weakened heart fails and he dies. Yet, partly because of George's sacrifice, Cocoa recovers. The novel's close in 1999, also the time of its beginning, shows Cocoa poised to succeed the 105-year-old Mama Day as the island's spiritual leader.

Naylor's novel Bailey's Cafe (1992) shows her continuing experimentation with patterns of narration, definitions of reality, and depiction of the supernatural. Centered on the New York City restaurant of its title and set in the late 1940s, the novel is orchestrated by the unnamed cafe owner, who is called Bailey. Bailey and his wife, Nadine, run the all-night eatery, which serves as a way station for lost souls of various backgrounds. Behind the cafe is the novel's most mystical realm: a dock on the water that is capable of transforming reality to match the expectations and needs of the wretched folks who come there.

One such character in need is Sadie, whose violent childhood at the hands of a drug-addicted prostitute mother leads her to seek quiet and cleanliness. Yet after Sadie's dream of having a home of her own is hopelessly thwarted, she escapes into alcoholism and works as a whore, earning only enough to support her habit of cheap wine. When Iceman Jones, another cafe customer, offers to fulfill her dream of security, her fantasy back behind the restaurant wins out over reality.

Just down the street from the cafe is Eve's place, a brothel that only takes fresh flowers for payment. Presided over by Eve, who has suffered unspeakable abuse from her godfather in Louisiana, this establishment only accepts the particular women whose horrific backgrounds Eve can relate to. One of its residents, Peaches, is so haunted by her own beauty that she slashes her face in order to curb unwanted male attention. Another inhabitant, Jesse Bell, is a bisexual heroin addict whom Eve helps recover by means of brutal, hellish temptation. This unique boardinghouse is cleaned and protected by Miss Maple (Stanley), a heterosexual transvestite who wears women's clothes simply because he finds them more comfortable. While searching for a job after receiving his doctorate in mathematics from Stanford, Miss Maple discovers the impenetrable wall of racism in corporate America. Eventually giving up, Miss Maple seeks a gun in Gabe's pawnshop, but then stumbles into Bailey's Cafe, meets Eve, and finds his home.

The most startling section of Bailey's Cafe concerns Mariam, a fourteen-year-old Ethiopian Jew, who is expecting a baby and who is also a virgin. Having experienced genital mutilation in her homeland, Mariam inexplicably becomes pregnant and still insists on her innocence. After she is expelled from her village, she makes her way to Addis Ababa and then somehow ends up on the doorstep belonging to Gabe, who is a Russian Jew. Eve takes her in and then arranges for Mariam to give birth in a “proper” but fantastical setting behind the cafe, which transforms into the ceremonial hut of her native Ethiopian village. Although Mariam eventually dies, her son, George, survives and is placed in an orphanage. Interestingly, Naylor makes it clear that he is the same character as George Andrews, one of the protagonists of Mama Day.

In The Men of Brewster Place, Naylor revisits the territory she explored in her 1992 novel. She gives voice to many of the silent and violent men who made miserable the lives of the women in that novel. Noteworthy among her creations is Basil, the young man for whom Mattie Michael lost her house when he jumped bail after having killed a man. Naylor revisits a tortured, guilt-ridden young man who tries to make up for past deeds by allowing himself to be used in the present action. Similar efforts to atone for past actions inform other characterizations, but Naylor also adds a couple of new faces into the mix. Perhaps a response to criticism about her treatment of men in The Women of Brewster Place and other works, the companion novel is intriguing but is perhaps ultimately not as well executed.

Naylor's important contributions to African American literature include her expansion of narrative technique and privileging of the supernatural—both approaches similar to those used by Toni Morrison. Naylor's interrelated fictive terrain also resonates with the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner, whose narrative style she has cited as an influence, especially on Mama Day. Gloria Naylor's most lasting contribution to literature may well be her vivid portraits of fascinating and fantastic characters.

Bibliography

• G. Michelle Collins, “There Where We Are Not: The Magical Real in Beloved and Mama Day,” Southern Review 24 (1988): 680–685.
• Larry R. Andrews, “Black Sisterhood in Gloria Naylor's Novels,” CLA Journal 33 (Sept. 1989): 1–25.
• Gloria Naylor, interview by
• Nicholas Shakespeare, Institute of Contemporary Arts— “Guardian” Conversations, directed by Fenella Green-field, 1989.
• Barbara Christian, “Gloria Naylor's Geography: Community, Class, and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills,” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1990, pp. 348–373.
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and
• K. A. Appiah, eds., Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993.
• Michelle C. Loris and
• Sharon Felton, eds., The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor, 1997.
• Patricia Hopkins Lattin, “Naylor's Engaged and Empowered Narrative,” College Language Association Journal 41:4 (June 1998): 452–469. Fred Metting, ”The Possibilities of Flight: The Celebration of Our Wings in Song of Solomon, Praisesong for the Widow, and Mama Day,” Southern Folklore 55:2 (1998): 145–168

Kristine A. Yohe

The author Gloria Naylor (born 1950) wrote novels that emphasized the strengths of women, especially African American women, and the effects on the lives of people of racism, sexism, and the drive for material gain at any expense.

Gloria Naylor was born in Harlem on January 25, 1950, a month after her parents, Alberta and Roosevelt Naylor, arrived in New York City. Her parents were sharecroppers from Robinsonville, Mississippi, and her mother was especially determined that her children, Gloria and two younger sisters, receive the best education that could be provided for them. Even as a farm worker Alberta Naylor had used some of her meager wages to buy books that the segregated libraries of Mississippi denied her. When Gloria was old enough to sign her name, her mother began to take her to the library. Naylor became a fervent reader and began to write poems and stories as a child.

Alberta Naylor worked as a telephone operator, and Roosevelt Naylor was a motorman for the New York Transit. The family eventually moved to Queens. A good student, Naylor attended classes for the gifted and talented. After graduating from high school, she decided to postpone college in order to serve as a Jehovah Witness missionary. This decision was greatly influenced by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Naylor felt that she needed to work to change the world, and the Witnesses' notion of a theocratic government seemed a viable solution to her. From 1968 to 1975 she proselytized in New York, North Carolina, and Florida.

Troubled by the restrictions of the religion and spurred by the need to develop her talents, she matriculated at the Medgar Evers campus of Brooklyn College. Working as a telephone operator in New York City hotels, she pursued a degree in nursing. However, when it became clear that she preferred her literature classes, she transferred to a major in English. As an avid reader from childhood, she already admired such writers as Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, Faulkner, Ellison, and Baldwin. She soon recognized that all of these writers were either "male or white."

Fortunately, a creative writing class introduced her to Toni Morrison. It was an inspirational discovery. Although Naylor considered herself a poet then, Morrison became a model for rendering one's own reality and for crafting beautiful language. Naylor began to attend readings by Morrison and to hone her own skills as a fiction writer.

In 1980 Naylor entered into a marriage that lasted for ten days. That same year she published her first story in Essence magazine. The secretary to the president of Viking publishing company, who was a friend of a friend, circulated four of Naylor's stories among the editors in January 1981. Two weeks later Naylor had a contract for the book that eventually became The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories (1982). The novel is actually a cycle of interconnected stories about seven women of different backgrounds who live in a decrepit building on Brewster Place, a dreary street cut off from the rest of the city by a wall. Despite their differences, all of them are united by their inability to fulfill dreams deferred by racism and sexism. The Women of Brewster Place won the American Book Award for the best first novel in 1983.

In 1981 Naylor received her B.A. from Brooklyn College and, using an advance from The Women of Brewster Place, set off for Spain in a brief sojourn patterned after the expatriate adventures of Hemingway and Baldwin. As a single woman traveling alone, she found herself approached often by men and began to resent the fact that she did not have the freedom to explore enjoyed by male writers, white and black. She shut herself up in a boarding house in Cadiz and began to write Linden Hills (1985).

The initial idea for this novel was influenced by her reading of The Inferno in a Great Literature course at Brooklyn. Linden Hills is an African American middle-class neighborhood patterned after the circular geography of Dante's hell. Two younger poets, outsiders in Linden Hills who are looking for work the week before Christmas, discover the neuroses and crimes of the bourgeois inhabitants, who have relinquished culture and values for material gain.

In 1981 Naylor had enrolled in the graduate program in African American studies at Yale. She thought it important to study works that "were reflections of me and my existence and experience" (Goldstein). She received her M.A. in 1983.

Naylor's third novel, Mama Day, was published in 1988. Its settings are New York City and Willow Springs, a sea island off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina whose most powerful inhabitant is Miranda (Mama) Day, healer and magician. When Mama Day's beloved niece, Cocoa, brings her husband George to visit, they all become involved in a plot to save Cocoa from a deadly curse. Naylor examined the conflicts between men and women, portraying the woman as the repository of the sensual and emotional and the male as the essence of rationality. Like Naylor's other novels, this one reverberates with the influences of traditional literature, this time Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Naylor has penned two other works Bailey's Cafe (1992) and a dramatic version of the story for the stage in 1994. In Bailey's Cafe published in 1992, Naylor focused on the interesting lives of the proprietors of a diner and it's various patrons. In this novel, Naylor demonstrates her ability to find heroism in the lives of everyday people, while at the same time showing their frustration at not being able to escape their position in life. Naylor is also the sole founder of One Way Productions, an independent film company.

Gloria Naylor was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts (1985) and a Guggenheim fellowship (1988), Naylor was one of only a few African American women ever to receive this honor. She was a cultural exchange lecturer for the United States Information Agency in India in 1985. She served as the writer-in-residence of the Cummington Community of Arts (Summer 1983); and as a visiting professor at George Washington University (1983-1984), University of Pennsylvania (1986), New York University (Spring 1986), Princeton (1986-1987), Boston University (1987), Brandeis University (1988), and Cornell (1988).

Further Reading

For more biographical information on Gloria Naylor see Naylor and Toni Morrison's, "A Conversation," in The Southern Review (Summer 1985) and W. Goldstein's, "Talk with Gloria Naylor," in Publishers Weekly (September 9, 1983). For critical information, see Michael Awkward's Inspiriting Influences (1989) and Catherine Ward's, "Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills A Modern Inferno," in Contemporary Literature (Spring 1987).

writer; poet; college teacher; screenwriter

Personal Information

Born on January 25, 1950, in New York, NY; daughter of Roosevelt (a transit worker) and Alberta (McAlpin) Naylor (a telephone operator)
Education: Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, BA in English, 1981; Yale University, MA in Afro-American Studies, 1983.

Career

Jehovah's Witnesses, missionary, 1968-75; worked as telephone operator at Sheraton City Square and other hotels, New York City, 1975-81; writer, 1981-; Cummington Community of the Arts, writer-in-residence, 1983; George Washington University, visiting lecturer, 1983-84; Callaloo, contributing editor, 1984; United States Information Agency, India, cultural exchange lecturer, 1985; University of Pennsylvania, scholar in residence, 1986; New York University, visiting professor, 1986; New York Times, columnist, 1986; Princeton University, visiting lecturer, 1986-87; Boston University, visiting professor, 1987; Book-of-the-Month Club, judge, 1988; Brandeis University, Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor, 1988; One Way Productions, founder and president, 1990-.

Life's Work

Since her first novel was published in 1982, Gloria Naylor has become one of the most critically acclaimed and popular black writers. Along with Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she is one of the key forces in the black feminist literary movement. At the same time, Naylor has avoided criticism leveled at her fellow black feminist writers for their negative depictions of black men.

Gloria Naylor was born on January 25, 1950, in New York, New York. Reading became a passion for Naylor at a young age, mostly due to her mother's influence. Alberta Naylor struggled to obtain books because, in rural Mississippi, African Americans were barred from taking them out of public libraries. After moving with her family to New York in 1949, she made sure her children got an early introduction to the wonders of reading, and Gloria was given her first library card around age four. She read voraciously throughout her childhood, partly because she was introverted and spent a lot of time alone. Since she rarely spoke, her mother gave her a diary that became an early training ground for the future writer.

King Assassination Shifted Life Course

An excellent student, Naylor was placed into advanced classes in high school. Her first exposure to English classics helped shape the foundation of her later writing efforts. "The passion of the Brontës, the irony of Jane Austen, and the social indignation of Dickens fed my imagination as I read voraciously," she said in the New York Times Book Review. However, her evolution as a writer was stalled during her senior year in high school as a result of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. King's death had a major impact on Naylor, leaving her bewildered about the black community and her own future. Her search for meaning led her to serve as a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, and Florida for the next seven years.

Naylor left the mission at age 25 and went back to school. As she wrote in the New York Times, "I had used that religion as a straitjacket--for my budding sexuality, for my inability to accept the various shadings of life--while doing it and myself an injustice." After taking nursing courses at Medgar Evers College, she transferred to Brooklyn College to pursue her interest in English literature. She helped pay for her schooling by working the night shift as a switchboard operator at various New York City hotels.

College was a pivotal time for Naylor. While there her black consciousness, especially as a black woman, began taking form and compelled her to explore her creative powers. Her eyes were opened greatly by reading the works of black female authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Drawing on these authors as role models, Naylor found her stride as a writer and was recognized for her talent soon after she began writing fiction. One of the first short stories she penned appeared in a 1980 issue of Essence, and before long she had a contract with Viking.

Naylor's first group of stories evolved into a novel, much of which she wrote while still working at hotel switchboards. The end result was The Women of Brewster Place, a saga of seven women of different ages, backgrounds, and lifestyles and how they confronted poverty, racism, sexism, and domestic strife both alone and together. Highly symbolic, the novel is set on a dead-end street that is cut off from "accepted" society by an ugly brick wall, much as blacks are pushed into ghettos by white society. One character yearns to see her fugitive son again. Another lives on the edge, then meets a man who is even more daring than she. Naylor covered the entire gamut of human experience, from Kiswana Browne, who defects from a comfortable middle-class existence to ally with the people of the street, to Cora Lee, whose overriding passion is the care of her beloved babies.

Shattered Stereotypes

Chief among Naylor's goals in The Women of Brewster Place was to shatter stereotypes about black women and demonstrate that their experience is as varied as that of whites. She also wanted to show the resilience of the downtrodden in overcoming tough circumstances. The Women of Brewster Place was both a critical and popular success. Publishers Weekly called it "a remarkable first novel from a gifted black writer [that] marks Gloria Naylor's talent as one to watch." The novel appeared on the Publishers Weekly trade paperback best-seller list, and was later made into a television movie starring Oprah Winfrey.

Naylor's next novel, Linden Hills was published in 1985. Featuring some of the same characters as her first novel, Linden Hills was set in a well-to-do black suburb that would have been considered a major move upward by the residents of Brewster Place. Critical consensus regarded this novel as much more adventurous and broader in scope than Naylor's first book. Throughout, Naylor made the point that attempting to rise in the ranks of white-dominated society through economic means results in a shallow victory. The book was cited for its obvious parallels to Dante's Inferno, as two male poets, Lester and Willie, come in from another town in search of work and make their way through a series of drives that ring the suburban development in a fashion similar to Dante's nine circles of hell. As the twosome venture down the hill, they meet those who have moved up in society. More or less cast in the role of the devil is Luther Nedeed, a local mortician and real estate mogul whose family has reigned at the top of the Linden Hills hierarchy for over 150 years.

Lester and Willie discover a series of lost souls yearning for a piece of the American dream, which ultimately cannot give them the fulfillment for which they yearn. Victims of Nedeed's carefully packaged optimism, these residents are in some ways trapped more inside Linden Hills than they would be on the outside. Some critics found the symbolism in Linden Hills too heavy-handed, while others felt the novel's good points won out over its weaknesses. In a 1985 review in the New York Times Michiko Kakutani wrote, "Although the notion of using Dante's Inferno to illuminate the coopting of black aspirations in contemporary America may strike the prospective reader as precious, one is quickly beguiled by the actual novel--so gracefully does Miss Naylor fuse together the epic and the naturalistic, the magical and the real."

Explored the Spiritual

Naylor's next novel, Mama Day, featured plot twists and themes centering on spiritualism and reconciliation, which drew comparisons with Shakespeare's The Tempest. Readers entered the world of Willow Springs, an island off the Georgia coast where a 90-year-old conjurer named Miranda "Mama" Day serves as a spiritual guide. Day had also made an appearance in Linden Hills.

"On this wondrous island," wrote Bharati Mukherjee in the New York Times Book Review, "slavery and race relations, lovers' quarrels, family scandals, professional jealousies all become the stuff [that] dreams are made on" Mukherjee called the novel "magnificent" in its depiction of a host of bizarre characters ranging from rogues and frauds to martyrs and clairvoyants. Mama Day was called farfetched by some critics, however, who said that its characters were not fully fleshed out. It also suffered from the baggage of a subsidiary love story that resembled the plight of Romeo and Juliet.

In Bailey's Café, published in 1992, Naylor focused on the intersecting lives of the proprietors of a diner and its various patrons. The cafe is a magnet that draws a wide variety of society's detritus, each with her own story to tell. Naylor's main concern here was female sexuality, and all sides of it are brought to light by characters ranging from Eve, the madam of a local brothel, to Sister Carrie, a nun. There's even an Ethiopian child who may be the bearer of a miracle. While in the outside world these characters may be thought of as misfits, in the cafe each one achieves a transcendent status and serves as a symbol of the triumph of perseverance over adversity. Once again, Naylor demonstrated her ability to find the heroism in the lives of everyday people, while at the same time showing their frustration at not being able to escape their position in life.

Concluded her "Apprenticeship"

Bailey's Café; represented the final chapter in Naylor's "novel quartet," as she referred to it. "I conceived them as a quartet from book one," she told the Writer. "And I had a purpose for it. I felt that by writing those four books, I would go through an apprenticeship to my craft. Then I would feel, within myself, that I was a writer. When I finished the last of that quartet, it was an exciting, exciting moment for me, to realize that I had set that goal and achieved it."

In 1994 Naylor adapted Bailey's Café; for the stage, which gave her the opportunity to dramatically display the rhythms of her characters' lives and speech patterns. In the New York Times, Ben Brantley offered a mixed review of the play's opening in Hartford, Connecticut. "Its allegorical elements," he said, "which were woven more slyly into the fabric of the novel, have been expanded and exaggerated here, and the play simply can't sustain their full weight." Still, he added that "Ms. Naylor is a masterly storyteller, and there's a rich narrative force to the individual monologues."

Naylor returned to Brewster Place in 1998, this time focusing on the male residents, in The Men of Brewster Place. Here she, according to African American Review "turns her artistic and political attention to the plight of the black man, and she does so in such a way as to render a compelling fictional expose of his dilemma." The African American Review noted that "there is little, if any, of the lyrical prose which readers have come to expect from this gifted novelist" and that the male characters "lack much of the emotional involvement and depth that make Naylor's female characters so memorable." Despite these failings, however, the African American Review called it "a much needed glimpse into the inner life of black men from a black woman's perspective."

Naylor explained her writing methods to Essence in 1995: "I tell the essence of a story not so much through my characters' words as by capturing a moment in time, frozen and perfect, when all their senses create a living reality." She expanded on her philosophy in Essence three years later. "Artists should be able to write about whatever they want," she said. "There's a lot of self-censorship in our community, which is a shame. People feel that they need to write role models, not just good characters."

Naylor's other writings have included one work of nonfiction, as well as essays and screenplays. In addition, she served as editor of Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to Present. She is also the founder of One Way Productions, an independent film company that she formed to bring Mama Day and other projects to the screen. The company has also produced a children's play. After a brief marriage during her years as a missionary, Naylor has decided not to remarry or have children because she felt that her solitude is vital for her work. One of the few black women to win the coveted Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, Naylor has been hailed, according to the African American Review, "one of contemporary African American literature's most insightful and significant writers."

Awards

American Book Award, for The Women of Brewster Place, 1983; NEA Fellowship Natl Endowment for the Arts, 1985; Guggenheim Fellowship 1988; Lillian Smith Award, 1989.

Works

Selected writings

• The Women of Brewster Place, Viking, 1982.
• Linden Hills, Ticknor & Fields, 1985.
• (nonfiction) Centennial, Pindar Press, 1986.
• Mama Day, Ticknor & Fields, 1988.
• Bailey's Café, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
• (play) Bailey's Café, 1994.
• (editor) Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to Present, 1995.
• The Men of Brewster Place, Hyperion, 1998.

• Also contributed to Southern Review, Essence, Ms., Life, Ontario Review, and People.

Further Reading

Books

• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K.A. Appiah, Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Amistad, 1988.
• Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine U. Henderson, Talks With America's Women, University Press of Kentucky, 1990, pp. 23-29.
• Who's Who Among African Americans, 16th edition, Gale, 2003.
• World Authors edited by Vineta Colby, H.W. Wilson, 1991, pp. 636-39.

• African American Review, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 172-188; Fall 1999, p. 543; Spring 2000, p. 176.
• Black Enterprise, July 1982, pp. 13, 70.
• Black Scholar, Winter 1994, p. 66.
• Booklist, February 15, 1995, p. 1099.
• Ebony, March 1989, p. 122.
• Essence, December 1988, p. 48; May 1995, p. 193; June 1998, p. 70.
• Ms., May 1986, pp. 56-62.
• New York, February 8, 1988, p. 94.
• New York Times, February 9, 1985; April 14, 1994, p. C17.
• New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1982, pp. 11, 25; May 13, 1984, p. 29; February 21, 1988, p. 7; October 4, 1992, p. 11.
• New York Times Magazine, December 20, 1992, p. 14.
• Publishers Weekly, September 9, 1983, p. 224; December 11, 1995, p. 56.
• Wilson Library Bulletin, June 1983, p. 844.
• Writer, December 1994, p. 21.

— Ed Decker and Jennifer M. York

Gloria Naylor

Gloria Naylor (born January 25, 1950 in New York City) is an African American novelist. Her novel The Women of Brewster Place was adapted into a 1989 film of the same name by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions.

Contents 1 Early life 2 School life 3 Career 4 Bibliography 5 Notes 6 External links

Early life

She was the first child to Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. As Naylor grew up, her father was a transit worker and her mother was a telephone operator. When Naylor was young, her mother encouraged her to read and keep a journal. Even though her mother barely had any education, she loved to read and often worked overtime in the fields as a sharecropper to produce enough money to join a book club. In 1963 she moved to Queens with her family. Five years later Naylor followed in her mother's footsteps and became a Jehovah's Witness, but she left seven years later as ”things weren't getting better, but worse.”^[1]

School life

Naylor worked as a switchboard operator for a few years while taking classes at Medgar Evers College then transferring to attend Brooklyn College, Naylor received her bachelor’s degree in English. Once completing that, she attended Yale University in order to obtain her master’s degree in Afro–American Studies. During her career as a professor, she taught writing and literature at several universities. She has taught at The George Washington University, New York University, Boston University, and Cornell University.

Career

The Women of Brewster Place was her first novel, which she wrote during her studies at Yale. This book was finished in 1983 and was widely known right after being published. She won the National Book Award for First Fiction in 1983 for her novel. Five years later, the book was turned into a movie in which Oprah Winfrey starred. Other novels which she has written often contain personal life stories and illustrate ideas from the Bible. She believes she has been subject to mind control and wrote about her experiences in the novel 1996.^[2]

Bibliography

• The Women of Brewster Place (1982), ISBN 0-670-77855-9
• Linden Hills (1985), ISBN 0-89919-357-9
• Mama Day (1988), ISBN 0-89919-716-7
• Bailey's Café (1992), ISBN 0-15-110450-6
• Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995), ISBN 0-316-59926-3 (editor)
• The Men of Brewster Place (1998), ISBN 0-7868-6421-4
• 1996 (2005), ISBN 0-88378-263-4

Notes

1. ^ Voices from the Gaps biography: Naylor, Gloria
2. ^ Weinberger, S: "Mind Games The Washington Post, January 14, 2007, W22

External links

• Biography
• [1]
• [2]
• [3]

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)