Gloria Naylor

In the short period of time since Gloria Naylor published her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), to wide acclaim, she has established herself as a significant contemporary writer. A self-avowed feminist and black cultural nationalist, Naylor has produced a body of work that resists easy classification. Through the four novels she has published to date, which also include Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), and Bailey's Cafe (1992), she enters into a dialogue with a wide assortment of earlier writers, from Shakespeare and Dante to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. In Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Virginia C. Fowler offers the first full-length study devoted exclusively to Naylor's work. Fowler insightfully analyzes Naylor's four novels, specifically focusing on aspects of the texts that have been largely unexamined to date. She also provides a general examination of important aspects of Naylor's life, including the Jehovah's Witness religion, of which Naylor was a member until she was 25, and the emergence in the late 1960s and early 1970s of a new generation of black women writers and scholars. Fowler reveals the extent to which Naylor's artistic sensibility has been shaped by her experiences as a Jehovah's Witness and her strong identification with feminism. The volume also features a valuable bibliography, a chronology of Naylor's life, and the text of a lengthy interview with Naylor that the author conducted in 1993.