Paule Marshall

(April 9, 1929-August 12, 2019)

Influential Writer
 Early Life
Valenza Pauline Burke, later known as
Paule Marshall, was born on April 9,
1929, in Brooklyn, New York. She was
born to Ada and Samuel Burke, both
emigrants from Barbados, and she
grew up in a neighborhood with a
significant number of other families
from the West Indies.
Marshall's father had She married Kenneth
migrated from the Marshall, a psychologist in
Caribbean island of 1957, divorcing six years
Barbados to New York in later; she later remarried
1919 and, during her Nourry Menard,
childhood a Haitian businessman
and had another divorce.
At first she wasn’t
exactly proud of her
Barbadian
background but it
later ended up being
her main inspiration
for her works.
2
 Hunter College, City
University of New 1955
York

Education
1945 1953

After completing school at Girl’s High Hunter

School in Bedstuy, she chose to further her Girl’s High College, City Brooklyn College 
University of
education with plans of becoming a social worker School in Bedstuy New York
at Hunter College, City University of New York.
 She took ill during college and took a year off,
during which time she decided, with the
influence of her friends, to major in English
1951
Literature. Eventually she earned herself
a Bachelor Of Arts Degree at Brooklyn College in
1953. She re-enrolled to Hunter College (1955)
where she earned her master’s degree
3
 Soul Clap Hands and
Brown Girl Brownstones The Chosen Place, the
Sing Timeless People

Insert Icon / Picture Insert Icon / Picture Insert Icon / Picture

Works
Her first piece, ‘Brown Girl Brownstones’ was
published in1959 and her final piece,
’Triangular Road’ on 2009. She published a
total of 9 novels within her lifetime. These Reena and Other Praisesong for the Merle: A Novella, and
included: 4
Stories Widow Other Stories
Works
Daughters The Fisher King
Triangular Road

5
Works 6

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, an American
daughter of Barbadian parents who travels to their homeland as
an adult. Marshall’s fiction is rooted in Black cultural history.
Her novels place an emphasis on Black female characters and she
used these characters to address contemporary feminist issues
from an Afrocentric perspective. She challenged her readers to
understand the political, social, and economic structures societies
are built on.
Career 7

She has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the

University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
and Yale University after which she was chosen by Langston
Hughes to accompany him on a world tour in which they both
read their work, which was a boom for her career. Early in her
career, she wrote poetry, but later returned to prose. Through five
novels and several collections of short stories and novellas, she
created strong female characters, evoked the linguistic rhythms of
Barbadian speech, and forged an early link between the African-
American and Caribbean literary canons.
 Awards and Master’s Degree  Guggenheim  Bachelor of Arts

recognition Fellowship  degree

She won a number of awards for

her famous pieces as well as
gaining recognition. These awards
would incude:

 National Institute of  Dos Passos Prize for  Anisfield-Wolf Book

Arts Award Literature Awards

8
Awards and    

recognition Honorary L.H.D Inducted into the Celebrity Designated as a Literary

Path Lion

9
 Insert Portrait Photo She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 and in the same
year published Soul Clap Hands and Sing, a collection of four
novels 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 served as a boost 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. Later, she became the holder of 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 was a
MacArthur Fellow and a winner of the Dos Passos Prize for
Awards and Literature. She was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York
Public Library in 1994. In 2010, Paule Marshall won a Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
Recognition 10
 Gender Relations in a
Life in Barbados Psychic Reintegration
Patriarchal

Themes

Postcolonial  Capitalist White Supremacist 11

Contributions to Caribbean Arts 12

- Paule Marshall, an influential writer whose novels and short stories about ethnic
identity, race and colonialism reflected her upbringing in Brooklyn as a daughter of poor
immigrants from Barbados.
- Through five novels and several collections of short stories and novellas, Ms. Marshall
(whose first name is pronounced “Paul”) created strong female characters, evoked the
linguistic rhythms of Barbadian speech, and forged an early link between the African-
American and Caribbean literary canons
- Ms. Marshall’s first novel, “Brown Girl, Brownstones” (1959), validated “culture-
specific values, language, histories and traditions.
Contributions to Caribbean Arts 13

-One scholar called Ms. Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” published in 1959, “the novel that
most black feminist critics consider to be the beginning of contemporary African-American women’s
writings.”
“Brown Girl, Brownstones” is set in Brooklyn, where a girl named Selina grows amid conflicts
between her Barbadian parents — a serious mother who wants to save to buy the brownstone they rent
and an impulsive father who wants to return to his homeland.
- She specializes in World Anglophone Literature with an emphasis on Caribbean Literature. Her
book, Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature
(University of Virginia Press, 2013), considers the ubiquity of madmen and madwomen in Caribbean
literature between 1959 and 1980
 Quote 14

"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.
Conclusion 15

To conclude the presentation even though Paule Marshall was not initially
proud of her Bajan background, this is what she based most of her later work
on. She was a prominent American novelist, notable for her 1959 debut novel
“Brown Girl, Brownstones”, whose novels and short stories about ethnic
identity, race and colonialism reflecting on her upbringing in Brooklyn as a
daughter of poor immigrants from Barbados.
Thank You

16
 • https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/19/paul
e-marshall-obituary
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paule-Marshall
• Sandomir, R. (2019). Paule Marshall,Influential
Caribbean Novelist, Dies at 90. Retrieved from
https://www.google.com/amp/s/repeatingislands.com/
2019/08/17/paule-marshall-influential-caribbean-
novelist-dies-at-90/amp/

References
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