Naylor, Gloria 1950—

views updated

Gloria Naylor 1950—

Writer

At a Glance…

Shattered Stereotypes

Explored the Spiritual

Concluded Her “Apprenticeship”

Selected writings

Sources

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.

Naylor started out writing poetry in college, a period during which she lacked the confidence to write prose. “I don’t believe I would have ever made the crucial leap from appreciative reader to writer were it not for my discovery of Toni Morrison in a creative writing course at Brooklyn College,” Naylor wrote in the New York Times Book Review. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye had a major effect on Naylor, who had not realized that there was a significant body of literature on the black female experience.

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, she was 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 at about 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.

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 Brontès, 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

At a Glance…

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

Missionary for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, 1968–75; worked as telephone operator at Sheraton City Square and other hotels, New York City, 1975–81; writer, 1981—; published first novel, 1982; writer in residence, Cummington Community of the Arts, 1983; visiting lecturer, George Washington University, 1983–84; became contributing editor, Callaloo, 1984; cultural exchange lecturer, United States Information Agency, India, 1985; scholar in residence, University of Pennsylvania, and visiting professor, New York University, 1986; contributed “Hers” columns to New York Times, 1986; visiting lecturer, Princeton University, 1986–87; visiting professor, Boston University, 1987; Book-of-the-Month Club judge, 1988; Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor, Brandeis University, 1988; wrote play based on her novel Bailey’s Cafe (first staged, 1994); founded independent film production company One Way Productions. Contributor to Southern Review, Essence, Ms., Life, Ontario Review, and People.

Addresses: Publisher —Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003.

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, 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 thé 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 Cafe, 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 is 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 Cafe 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 Cafe 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’s other writings have included one work of nonfiction, as well as essays and screenplays. 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. After a brief marriage during her years as a missionary, Naylor has decided not to remarry or have children because she feels that her solitude is vital for her work. Her commitment to her craft resulted in her becoming one of the few black women to win the coveted Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, and has made her one of the most important voices in black feminist literature.