DuBose Heyward Books In Order

Novels

  1. Porgy (1924)
  2. Mamba’s Daughters (1929)
  3. Peter Ashley (1932)
  4. Star Spangled Virgin (1939)

Collections

Plays

Picture Books

  1. The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (1930)

Novellas

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Picture Books Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

DuBose Heyward Books Overview

Porgy

The fictional characters of Porgy, Bess, Black Maria, Sportin’ Life, and the other Gullah denizens of Catfish Row have attained a mythic status and have become inextricably identified with Charleston. This novel is the story of Porgy, a crippled street beggar in the black tenement. Unwashed and un wanted, he lives just on the edge of subsistence and trusts his fate to the gods and chance. His one shining moment is his pursuit of Bess, whom he wins and then loses during one summer of passion and violence. This story by DuBose Heyward is, of course, the origin of George Gershwin’s acclaimed folk opera Porgy and Bess. Heyward created Porgy with such sympathy, honesty, and insight that Porgy has ascended into the pantheon of the universal. This Banner Books edition includes an afterword by James M. Hutchisson, Heyward’s biographer, who places Porgy in its social and historical context and shows how the novel revolutionized American literature. Heyward had no literary training, and he wrote Porgy while working as an insurance agent. It is ironic that this deeply feeling author was a member of the Charleston aristocracy which regarded African Americans as little more than servants. Indeed, the tightly knit black community is celebrated in the novel and is contrasted with Charleston’s white culture, which in Heyward’s view lacked the vitality and rich social ethos of the Gullahs. In 1927, even before Gershwin transformed the novel with a musical score, the book was successfully dramatized for the New York stage. The production revolutionized the black theater movement with its casting of black actors. Porgy, published in 1925, proved to be on the leading edge of the great southern renaissance, in which works by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and others would depict black characters of increasing emotional and psychological complexity. The novel has gone through seven editions and has been translated into French, Gullah, and German, among other languages and dialects. DuBose Heyward 1885 1940 published Porgy to tremendous critical acclaim and financial success. He wrote poetry, short fiction, plays, and screenplays. James M. Hutchisson is a professor of English at The Citadel in Charleston.

Mamba’s Daughters

1929. Heyward’s first novel Porgy was an immediate success. He started his literary career with short stories of Negro life in his native South and his novel Mamba’s Daughters returns to that theme. The book begins: It was no mere chance that, during the first decade of the new century, brought Mamba out of the darkness of the underworld into the light of the Wentworths’ kitchen. Casual as that event seemed, there is good evidence for the belief that it had its origin in some obscure recess of the woman’s mind; or in perhaps some deep and but half comprehended instinct that drove her, against the reasoning of her brain, to embark upon what must have seemed a fantastically hopeless venture. For Mamba had arrived at an age that lay on the downhill side of fifty, and her habitat had always been the waterfront. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Peter Ashley

Set in Charleston on the eve of South Carolina’s secession from the Union, DuBose Heyward s Peter Ashley weaves together fact and fiction in one of the first historical novels of its kind. A departure from Heyward s focus on African American and Gullah culture, Peter Ashley explores war, class and Southern society. Peter is a young man, just returned from Oxford, who questions Southern ideals and values as he fights to pursue a literary career and remain uninvolved in the bitter conflict that has seized the nation. He finds himself torn between choosing a life of art and individuality or conforming to tradition. This is a novel of love, war and, above all, social criticism as Heyward unabashedly points out the tensions and hypocrisies of the antebellum South as it is forced into a new age.

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes

To celebrate the seventieth anniversary ofThe Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoesa special gift edition has been created. The gift set includes a golden shoes charm perfect for anyone who hopes to be wise, kind, and brave! This beloved tale of a mother bunny who dreams of being one of the official Easter Bunnies but must first prove herself to old Granfather Bunny, has won the hearts of generations and continues to appear on our best seller list every Easter.

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