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Paule Marshall is an American author, best known for her 1959 novel Brown Girl Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a Macarthur Fellowship Grant.

Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Adriana Viola Clement Burke and Sam Burke who migrated from Barbados to New York in 1919. As a child, Marshall's father deserted her family to become a member of Father Divine's quasi­religious cult, a sect that was popular back in the thirties and forties, leaving her mother to raise Marshall and her two siblings alone. Smitten with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, she changed her given name from Pauline to Paule (with a silent e) when she was 12 or 13. Marshall attended Girls’ High School in Bedstuy and eventually earned her Bachelor of Arts at Brooklyn College in 1953 and her Masters degree at Hunter College in 1955. After graduating college, Marshall wrote for “Our World,” the acclaimed nationally distributed magazine edited for African-American readers, which she credited with teaching her discipline in writing and eventually aiding her in writing her first novel; Brown Girl, Brownstones.

Brown Girl, Brownstones, Marshall’s first novel, tells the story of Selina Boyce, a girl growing up in  a small black immigrant community. Selina is caught between her mother, who wants to conform to  the ideals of her new home and make the American dream come true, and her father, who longs to  go back to Barbados. The dominant themes in the novel – travel, migration, psychic fracture and  striving for wholeness – are important structuring elements in her later works as well.

Final Topic: Paule Marshall

Sources: Pettis, J., & Marshall, P. (1991). A MELUS Interview: Paule Marshall. MELUS, 17(4), 117-129

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/467272.pdf

http://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1152&context=english-faculty-publications

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/books/12paul.html?_r=0

http://www.bellastander.com/paule.htm

https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/11/marshall-paule/

"MacArthur Fellows Program." RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.