Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones.
15 Facts About Paule Marshall
2.
In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
3.
Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, to Adriana Viola Clement Burke and Sam Burke on April 9,1929.
4.
Paule Marshall's father had migrated from the Caribbean island of Barbados 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.
5.
Paule Marshall attended Bushwick High School and subsequently enrolled in Hunter College, City University of New York, with plans of becoming a social worker.
6.
Paule Marshall took ill during college and took a year off, during which time she decided to major in English Literature, eventually earning her Bachelor of Arts degree at Brooklyn College in 1953 and her master's degree at Hunter College in 1955.
7.
In 1950 she married psychologist Kenneth Paule Marshall; they divorced in 1963.
8.
Paule Marshall received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 and in the same year published Soul Clap Hands and Sing, a collection of four novellas that won her the National Institute of Arts Award.
9.
Paule Marshall subsequently published the novels The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, 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, the latter winning the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1984.
10.
Paule Marshall taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale University, before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University.
11.
Paule Marshall was a MacArthur Fellow and a winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature.
12.
Paule Marshall was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994.
13.
Paule Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001.
14.
In 2010, Paule Marshall won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
15.
Paule Marshall died in Richmond, Virginia on August 12,2019, having had dementia in her later years.