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 was an exuberant and sharpened storyteller who drew upon classic and vernacular literature and her mother’s kitchen conversations for such fiction as “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” ”Daughters” and “Praisesong for the Widow.”

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.

Hillel Italie, The Associated Press