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Gloria Naylor won the “American Book Award” for best novel for her work, The Women of Brewster Place, on April 28, 1983.

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Naylor, Gloria born 1950, novelist, essayist,screenplay writer, columnist, and educator. Gloria Naylor was born in New York City on 25 January to Roosevelt  and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, who had recently migrated northward from their native Robinsonville, Mississippi. Having worked as cotton sharecroppers in Mississippi, her father became a transit worker for the New York City subway system and her mother a telephone operator. Naylor, who was a very shy child, grew up in New York City, where she lived until she graduated from high school in 1968.

From shortly after her graduation until 1975, Naylor worked as a missionary for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, and Florida. Eventually deciding that missionary life and the Jehovah’s Witnesses were not for her, Naylor returned to New York City and attended college while working as a telephone operator in several different hotels. Although she studied nursing for a short time at Medgar Evers College, she soon decided to pursue a BA in English at Brooklyn College, from which she graduated in 1981. Next Naylor entered Yale University on a fellowship and received an MA in Afro-American studies there in 1983. Having published her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, in 1982, she wrote for her master’s thesis at Yale what would become her second novel, Linden Hills (published 1985).

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