The Women of Brewster Place (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

NAYLOR, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.

Octavo. Full deep purple leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 192 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the dedication page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper.

Gloria Naylor (1950–2016) grew up in New York City, the daughter of sharecroppers who had migrated north from Mississippi. She worked as a Jehovah's Witness missionary for seven years before returning to formal education, taking her BA in English from Brooklyn College and her MA in Afro-American Studies from Yale. The Women of Brewster Place was her first novel. It won the National Book Award for First Fiction in 1983 and was adapted into a television miniseries in 1989, produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey alongside Cicely Tyson and Robin Givens. It remains among the most significant American debut novels of the twentieth century.

Brewster Place is a dead-end street in an unnamed northern city — once home to poor Irish and Italian immigrants, now the last resort of Black families with nowhere else to go, sealed at one end by a brick wall that the novel uses as its central image of confinement and exclusion. The novel is structured as seven interconnected stories, each centred on a woman who lives there: Mattie Michael, the matriarch who has sacrificed everything for a son who destroys her; Etta Mae Johnson, who has spent a life pursuing men and freedom and arrives in late middle age with neither; Kiswana Browne, who has left her prosperous family for political principle; Cora Lee, whose love of babies cannot survive their growing up; Lorraine and Theresa, the lesbian couple whose presence brings the neighbourhood's latent violence to the surface; and Lucielia Louise Turner, whose losses accumulate beyond what a person should be asked to bear. In the novel's final section these separate stories converge into a collective act of defiance and grief that is one of the most powerful closings in contemporary American fiction.

The New York Times Book Review described the novel as "a shrewd and lyrical portrayal of many of the realities of black life." Claude Brown wrote that Naylor was "the most refreshing voice in the black idiom since readers first discovered Toni Morrison." The comparison is apt and precise: both writers attend to the interior lives and communal bonds of Black women in America with an intimacy and authority that makes the work feel like testimony as much as fiction. Naylor died in September 2016, the same year this Easton Press edition was published, making this signature among the last she provided.

Near fine. Some very minor loss to cover gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000491