The emergence of Gloria Naylor on the American literary scene was sudden--The Women of Brewster Place (1982) was her first book--and intense, as Naylor added her voice to those of the few black women who write about real African Americans. Like Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Naylor writes about characters whose experiences and vernacular more closely resemble those of the majority of black people than those depicted by most earlier black women novelists, both of the nineteenth century and the Harlem Renaissance. Naylor continues the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston, the first African American woman novelist to write without the constrictions of a "double consciousness" to create an art form that explores the richness and complexities of African American life. Naylor's first published fiction, the short stories "A Life on Beekman Place" (March 1979) and "When Mama Comes to Call" (August 1982), appeared in Essence magazine. Both stories...