Naylor, Gloria

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Naylor, Gloria

January 25, 1950

Gloria Naylor, a writer, was born in New York City to Roosevelt and Alberta Naylor. After traveling through New York, Florida, and North Carolina as a missionary for Jehovah's Witnesses (1968–1975), she returned to New York, where she worked as a telephone operator at various hotels while she attended Brooklyn College (B.A., 1981). She received an M.A. in Afro-American Studies from Yale University in 1983.

Naylor's first published work, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), won the American Book Award for best first novel in 1983. Dealing with the lives of seven black women who live on one ghetto street, the novel conveys the oppression and spiritual strength that African-American women share. At the same time, by exploring the characters' differences, it emphasizes the variety of their experience. Naylor wrote a television screenplay adaptation of the novel, which starred Oprah Winfrey and appeared on American Playhouse in 1984. Her next novel, Linden Hills (1985), is concerned with the spiritual decay of a group of black Americans who live in an affluent community, having forsaken their heritage in favor of material gain. Mama Day, published in 1988, tells of an elderly lady with magical powers. The best-selling Bailey's Cafe (1992) takes place in a 1940s American diner where neighborhood prostitutes congregate. Naylor wrote a play based on the novel, which was produced and performed by the Hartford Stage Company in 1994. She also wrote the screenplay for the PBS presentation In Our Own Words (1985).

Naylor has said that she writes because her perspective, that of the black American woman, has been underrepresented in American literature. Her goal is to present the diversity of the black experience. Although she reworks traditional Western sources in her novels, borrowing the structure of Dante's Inferno for Linden Hills and elements of Shakespeare's The Tempest for Mama Day, Naylor utilizes black vernacular and other aspects of her own heritage in her writing.

Naylor's 1998 novel, The Men of Brewster Place, returns readers to the setting of her first story, this time to relate the stories of the men in the lives of the original characters. Naylor said this fifth novel was inspired by the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., which took place in the fall of 1995, as well as by the death of her father. Both events helped the author to reassess certain ideas she held about men and their roles in the lives of African-American women.

Naylor has taught at George Washington University, New York University, Princeton, Cornell, and Boston University. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1985), the Distinguished Writer Award from the Mid-Atlantic Writers Association (1983), the Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women (1986), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1988). She was awarded a President's Medal from Brooklyn College in 1993, and an honorary doctorate of letters from Sacred Heart University in 1994.