April 9, 1929 – Paule Marshall born Valenza Pauline Burke was a Black American writer,

April 9, 1929 – Paule Marshall born Valenza Pauline Burke was a Black American writer,

April 9, 1929 – Paule Marshall born Valenza Pauline Burke was a Black American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones was born in Brooklyn, NY, on this date in 1929. Smitten with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Marshall changed her given name from Pauline to Paule when she was 12 or 13 years old. She attended Bushwick High School and subsequently enrolled in Hunter College, City University of New York, with plans of becoming a social worker.She took ill during college and took a year off, during which time she decided to major in English Literature, eventually earning her Bachelor of Arts degree at Brooklyn College in 1953 and her master””s degree at Hunter College in 1955.After graduating from college, Marshall wrote for Our World, the acclaimed nationally distributed magazine edited for Black American readers, which she credited with teaching her discipline in writing and eventually aiding her in writing her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones.Early in her career, she wrote poetry, but later returned to prose, her debut novel being published in 1959. Brown Girl, Brownstones tells the story of Selina Boyce, a girl growing up in a small black immigrant community. Selina is caught between her mother, who wants to conform to the ideals of her new home and make the American dream come true, and her father, who longs to go back to Barbados.The dominant themes in the novel travel, migration, psychic fracture and striving for wholeness are important structuring elements in her later works as well. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 and in the same year published Soul Clap Hands and Sing, a collection of four novellas that won her the National Institute of Arts Award.In 1965, she was chosen by Langston Hughes to accompany him on a State Department-sponsored world tour, on which they both read their work, which was a boon to her career. She subsequently published the novels The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), which the New York Times Book Review called “one of the four or five most impressive novels ever written by a black American”, and Praisesong for the Widow (1983), the latter winning the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1984.In 2021, the book was reissued by McSweeney””s, as part of their “Of the Diaspora” series highlighting important works in Black literature, with an introduction by Opal Palmer Adisa. Marshall taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers”” Workshop, and Yale University, before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University.
In 1993 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. She lived in Richmond, Virginia. She was a MacArthur Fellow and a winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994. Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001. Her memoir, Triangular Road, was published in 2009.
In 2010, Paule Marshall won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. She died in Richmond, Virginia on August 12, 2019, having had dementia in her later years.