Jan 6, 2010
1959 | 1959
At a glance:
- Author: Thulani Davis
- First Published: 1992
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Social realism
- Time of Work: 1959
- Setting: The Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia
- Principal Characters: Willie Tarrant, Dixon Tarrant, Ralph Johnson, Mae Taliaferro, Coleman Boteler, Maddie Alexander, Herman Shaw
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Social realism
- Subjects: 1950’s, African Americans, Civil rights, Dictators, Discrimination, Girls, Justice, Maturation or coming of age, Segregation or integration, Social action, Teaching or teachers, Virginia
- Locales: Chesapeake Bay, Virginia
The Novel
On the surface, 1959 recounts the rite of passage of Katherine “Willie”
Tarrant. Through the use of a first-person narrator, Davis presents an evocative portrait of a young
African American teenager living during the 1950’s, an era beset by injustice and growing
racial unrest.
The novel opens with the razing of Turner, Virginia. Above the sounds of bulldozers rumbling
over what were once modest wooden bungalows, the adult Willie Tarrant muses over the history of
the town. She imagines the arrival of an African woman three hundred years earlier....
[The entire page is 2580 words long]
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