Paule Marshall, novelist of diverse influences, dead at 90

Acclaimed fiction writer Paule Marshall has died at 90.

Marshall's son, Evan K. Marshall, told The Associated Press that she died Monday in Richmond, Virginia. Further details were not immediately available.

Paule Marshall, an exuberant and sharpened storyteller who in fiction such as "Daughters" and "Brown Girl, Brownstones" drew upon classic and vernacular literature and her mother's kitchen conversations to narrate the divides between blacks and whites, men and women and modern and traditional cultures, has died at age 90.

First published in the 1950s, Marshall was for years virtually the only prominent black woman fiction writer in the U.S., a bridge between Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and others who emerged in the 1960s and '70s. Calling herself "an unabashed ancestor worshipper," Marshall was the Brooklyn-born daughter of Barbadian immigrants.

Associated Press