Mama Day | Author Biography

Born in 1950 Gloria Naylor was raised in New York by working-class parents. Her mother encouraged her to write when she began to exhibit creative ability at the age of seven. But when she graduated from high school, instead of attending college as her parents wished, she became a Jehovah's Witness, traveling through New York and the South from 1968 to 1975. After she returned to New York, she earned her degree in English from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1981.

Gloria Naylor
Gloria Naylor

It was in college that she first learned about the rich tradition of African-American literature. She told Allison Gloch in 1993, "I was 27 years old before I knew Black women even wrote books." Her reading of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and others inspired her to begin writing herself. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, chronicled the lives of seven very different women living in an African-American community. The success of the novel immediately made her a prominent figure in the renaissance of African-American women writers. The following year, the novel won an American Book Award, and she received her M.A. in African-American Studies from Yale University. Her master's thesis became her second novel, Linden Hills (1985), which used Dante's Inferno as a thematic and structural guide for her explication of the moral downfall of well-to-do blacks who lose touch with their racial heritage.

Naylor's third novel, Mama Day, was her first to explore the experiences of African-Americans in the South. To write the novel, she drew on her parents' stories about living there and her own experiences as a Jehovah's Witness traveling the region. This novel was a culmination of her concern with the loss of identity and heritage suffered by contemporary urban African-Americans. The novel emanated, she told Michelle C. Loris in 1996, from her "belief in love and magic … I know that love can heal."

Naylor connects her writings by having the same characters appear in more than one novel. Mama Day first appeared in Linden Hills, and George's mother became a central character in Bailey's Cafe (1992). The Day family will reappear in a future novel, Sapphira Wade, she told Loris. In this book, "Cocoa comes back as an old woman. It's 2023." Naylor will also tell the stories of Bascombe and Sapphira Wade from 1817 to 1823. "Always in my head Sapphira Wade would be the cornerstone because she has been the guiding spirit for now close to twenty years, and now it's time to grapple with her," Naylor said. For Naylor, writing about the present and future African-American community means grappling with its past as well as the rich folklore, language, and tradition that have sustained it.