SOURCE: "A Romance of Negro Life," in The New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1925, pp. 10-11.

In the following review, the critic comments favorably on Porgy, focusing on the quality of Heyward's characterization in the work.

[In Porgy] Dubose Heyward challenges attention and evokes a mood with his initial daring stroke: "Porgy lived in the Golden Age." It is a timeless, innocently grotesque world that Porgy knows, and the reader through Porgy. It is a Southern seaport, possibly Mr. Heyward's own Charleston, S. C., though the geography is not insisted upon. More specifically, it is Catfish Row, the glamorous retreat of the crippled darky, Porgy, and his friendly neighbors. The white world but vaguely impinges upon their absorptions, their sorrows, their tragedies and their rude but satisfying justice. The interventions of the whites are often meaningless, often disastrous, always impertinent. Mr. Heyward establishes by implication an antithesis in...