For years Marshall was virtually the only major black woman fiction writer in the U.S., a bridge between Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and others
Born April 9, 1929, in Brooklyn, Valenza Pauline Burke was an immersive reader who loved old British novels, from “Tom Jones” to “Great Expectations.” But she longed for books that included people more like herself, and so made an instant and deeper connection to the poetry in dialect of Paul Laurence Dunbar and later to writings by Hurston and Hughes, among others.
Marshall graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors from Brooklyn College and during much of the 1950s worked as a magazine researcher, traveling to Brazil and the West Indies, among other places.
Raising a child alone weighed down her already deliberate style, and she published just five novels, a memoir and two books of short fiction. She disparaged the old expression “As for living, our servants will do that for us” by adding, “Well, I was the servant.”
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