Paule Marshall's fiction makes a distinctive addition to African American and American literature. She uses her literary imagination to invoke experiences of the African Diaspora. Since her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Marshall's work has consistently explored conflicts, themes, and events particular to people of African descent. The ideas in her fiction are explored against a geographically diverse canvas that includes the Caribbean with its history of European colonization and the segregationist history of the United States. Thus, history and community, shapers of the past and the present, are vital subtexts in the lives of Marshall's characters. Just as important, Marshall explores the notion of cultural continuity through identification with African heritage and culture as a means of healing the psychic fragmentation that has resulted from colonization and segregation. Her fiction is noted for its artistry--for finely crafted structures, fluid narrative, for language that conveys the nuances of...