Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Paule Marshall: A Writer's Life

Paule Marshall: A Writer's Life

Washington, Mary Helen

Hardcover

Series: Black Lives

Literary FiguresLiterary Criticism

Publisher Price: $30.00

ISBN10: 0300253850
ISBN13: 9780300253856
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Feb 10 2026
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.60
Language: English

An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women's experiences across the African diaspora

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literature Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer's papers, including her newly discovered unpublished memoir, and scores of interviews with family and friends to give us the first account of Marshall's life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her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.

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