The Women of Brewster Place Study Guide

Gloria Naylor was born in New York City in 1950 to Roosevelt and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, former Mississippi sharecroppers who had moved north seeking better job prospects. During Gloria Naylor’s teenage years, her mother converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and after Naylor graduated from college, she worked as a Jehovah’s Witness missionary for several years. After leaving missionary work, she continued her education, earning a BA in English from Brooklyn College in 1981 and an MA in African-American Studies from Yale University in 1983. While earning her MA, Naylor published her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories (1982), which won the National Book Award for First Novel in 1983. Her second novel, Linden Hills (1985), takes place in a fictional, upper-middle-class Black neighborhood called Linden Hills, which she first introduced in The Women of Brewster Place. Her sixth novel, The Men of Brewster Place (1998), returns to the apartment complex Brewster Place to focus on its male residents. Winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Naylor was critically acclaimed throughout her career. When she died of a heart attack in 2016, she was working on a never-completed novel called Sapphira Wade.

The Women of Brewster Place refers to several pivotal moments in American history. It mentions Emancipation, a word that may refer both to President Abraham Lincoln’s January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation (an executive order declaring the freedom of all enslaved people in the Confederate States that had seceded from the U.S.) and to the January 1865 passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which illegalized all slavery except as punishment for a crime. The novel also suggests that Brewster Place, the apartment complex where the narrative takes place, was built during World War II, (1939–1945), a global military conflict between the Allies (the U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R., and China, and their allies) and the Axis Powers (Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and their allies). It is also mentioned in the narrative that, during World War II, the streets around Brewster Place were paved by the Works Progress Administration, a U.S. government agency that existed between 1935 and 1943 to execute public works projects. After World War II, the Brewster Place neighborhood experiences “white flight,” a phenomenon common in the U.S. during the 1950s, in which white people move out of racially mixed cities into racially homogenous white suburbs, leading to de facto segregation and public disinvestment in racially diverse urban areas.

The Woman of Brewster Place (1982) is a novel composed of short stories set in and around a neglected apartment complex in an unnamed northern city. Its structure may have been inspired by James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), modernist literary works constructed of short stories set in and around a single location (Dublin and small-town Ohio respectively). The Women of Brewster Place may have helped kickstart a subsequent boom in novels composed of short stories, such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016). Prior to writing The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor studied and drew inspiration from the writings of Black American women authors, including Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). Naylor in turn inspired writers including Tayari Jones, whose fourth novel An American Marriage (2018) won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction and who wrote the foreword to the 2020 Penguin Edition of The Women of Brewster Place. Sixteen years after publishing The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor published a novel called The Men of Brewster Place (1998), which represents the lives of men in the same neglected apartment complex.