Heyward, Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns

(1890-1961) and Dubose

(1885-1940)

   The Heywards crafted two of his novels into important folk dramas of African American life. A native of South Carolina, Heyward was an insurance man who published short stories and poetry in the early 1920s. With his wife's collaboration, he adapted his novel Porgy into a 1927 Pulitzer PRizE-winning drama depicting a crippled black beggar's doomed love for a faithless woman. Heyward collaborated when George Gershwin composed a folk opera, Porgy and Bess (1935), from this play. Heyward's 1931 drama Brass Ankle, written specifically for the stage, is the tale of a woman who plans suicide when she learns she has Negro blood. Another dramatized Heyward novel, Mamba's Daughters* (1939), a melodrama concerning three generations of a black family, benefited from the compelling performance of Ethel Waters.*