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    A Study Guide for Gloria Naylor's Mama Day
    A Study Guide for Gloria Naylor's Mama Day
    A Study Guide for Gloria Naylor's Mama Day
    Ebook39 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Gloria Naylor's "Mama Day," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535828017
    A Study Guide for Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Gloria Naylor's Mama Day - Gale

      1

      Mama Day

      Gloria Naylor

      1988

      Introduction

      Gloria Naylor's first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), made her an overnight success, but her third novel, Mama Day (1988), solidified her reputation as one of the foremost authors of the African-American women's fiction renaissance, along with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and others. Although reviewers were initially confused by the novel's mixture of realism and the supernatural, most readers consider Mama Day a powerful and richly-layered depiction of how the past and the present, the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural converge in the lives of African-Americans.

      The novel juxtaposes the story of a successful African-American businessman, George, who has grown up in New York City, cut off from any sense of where he or his people came from, with that of a young African-American woman, Cocoa, who must come to terms with her powerful ancestral legacy. Their clash and uneasy union is brought to a head when they visit Cocoa's home, Willow Springs, a magical place that holds the secrets of Cocoa's past and the key to her future.

      Author Biography

      Born in 1950, Gloria Naylor was raised in New York by working-class parents. Her mother encouraged her to write when she began to exhibit creative ability at the age of seven. But when she graduated from high school, instead of attending college, as her parents wished, she became a Jehovah's Witness, traveling through New York and the South from 1968 to 1975. After she returned to New York, she earned her degree in English from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1981.

      It was in college that she first learned about the rich tradition of African-American literature. She told Allison Gloch in 1993, I was 27 years old before I knew Black women even wrote books. Her reading of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and others, inspired her to begin writing herself. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, chronicled the lives of seven very different women living in an African-American community. The success of the novel immediately made her a prominent figure in the renaissance of African-American women writers. The following year, the novel won an American Book Award, and she received her M.A. in African-American Studies from Yale

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