George Washington Lee is best remembered for both his fictional and factual accounts of black life on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, and his realistic portrayal of black tenant farmers as they related with one another and with the white majority that surrounded them. Lee is also the first black novelist to give detailed treatment to the adventures of a semilegendary racial hero.

Lee was born four miles west of Indianola, Mississippi, to Reverend George and Hattie Lee. Soon after George's birth, his parents separated; when Reverend Lee died, the family had to move into a sharecropper's shack. Determined to raise her family above the level of poor farmers, Hattie Lee managed to enroll George and his brother Abner in the nearest available school. During his early years George Lee worked as cotton planter and picker, grocery boy, houseboy, and dray driver. With money he earned as a...