Paule Marshall | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Valenza Pauline Burke (1929-04-09)April 9, 1929 Brooklyn,New York City, U.S. |
| Died | August 12, 2019(2019-08-12) (aged 90) Richmond, Virginia, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Hunter College,City University of New York |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Notable work | Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959);The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969);Praisesong for the Widow (1983) |
| Spouse(s) | Kenneth Marshall (married 1950; divorced 1963; Nourry Menard (married 1970s) |
Paule Marshall (April 9, 1929 – August 12, 2019) was an American writer, best known for her 1959debut novelBrown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded aMacArthur Fellowship grant.
Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke inBrooklyn, New York.[1] to Adriana Viola Clement Burke and Sam Burke on April 9, 1929.[2] Marshall's father had migrated from the Caribbean island ofBarbados to New York in 1919 and, during her childhood, deserted the family to join a quasi-religious cult, leaving his wife to raise their children by herself.[3] Marshall wrote about how her career was inspired by observing her mother's relationship to language: "It served as therapy, the cheapest kind available to my mother and her friends. It restored them to a sense of themselves and reaffirmed their self-worth. Through language they were able to overcome the humiliations of the work day. Confronted by a world they could not encompass, they took refuge in language."[4] Smitten with the poetPaul Laurence Dunbar, Marshall changed her given name from Pauline to Paule (with a silent e) when she was 12 or 13 years old.[5]
She attendedBushwick High School and subsequently enrolled inHunter 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,[6] eventually earning herBachelor of Arts degree atBrooklyn College in 1953 and her master's degree at Hunter College in 1955.[7][8] After graduating from college, Marshall wrote forOur World, the acclaimed nationally distributed magazine edited for African-American readers, which she credited with teaching her discipline in writing and eventually aiding her in writing her first novel,Brown Girl, Brownstones.[9] In 1950, she married psychologist Kenneth Marshall; they divorced in 1963. In the 1970s, she married Nourry Menard, aHaitian businessman.[10]
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.[7] 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.[7] The dominant themes in the novel – travel, migration, psychic fracture and striving for wholeness – are important structuring elements in her later works as well.[7]
Marshall received aGuggenheim Fellowship in 1961 and in the same year publishedSoul Clap Hands and Sing, a collection of four novellas that won her theNational Institute of Arts Award.[10] In 1965, she was chosen byLangston Hughes to accompany him on aState Department-sponsored world tour, on which they both read their work, which was a boon to her career.[11] She subsequently published the novelsThe Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), which theNew York Times Book Review called "one of the four or five most impressive novels ever written by a black American",[12] andPraisesong for the Widow (1983), the latter winning theBefore Columbus FoundationAmerican Book Award in 1984.[13] 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 byOpal Palmer Adisa.
Marshall taught atVirginia Commonwealth University, theUniversity of California, Berkeley, theIowa Writers' Workshop, andYale University, before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture atNew York University.[14] In 1993 she received anhonorary L.H.D. fromBates College. She lived inRichmond, Virginia.
She was a 1992MacArthur Fellow[15] and a winner of theDos Passos Prize for Literature. She was designated as a Literary Lion by theNew York Public Library in 1994.
Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at theBrooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001.
Her memoir,Triangular Road, was published in 2009.[16]
In 2010, Paule Marshall won a Lifetime Achievement Award from theAnisfield-Wolf Book Awards.[17] She died inRichmond, Virginia on August 12, 2019, having haddementia in her later years.[18] A biography byMary Helen Washington, to be published byYale University Press, is in preparation.[19]
"I realise that it is fashionable now to dismiss the traditional novel as something of an anachronism, but to me it is still a vital form. Not only does it allow for the kind of full-blown, richly detailed writing that I love… but it permits me to operate on many levels and to explore both the inner state of my characters as well as the worlds beyond them."[20]
