Dubose Heyward

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Edwin DuBose Heyward (August 31, 1885 – June 16, 1940) was an American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy.

He and his wife Dorothy, a playwright, adapted it as a 1927 play of the same name.

The couple worked with composer George Gershwin to adapt the work as the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess.

It was later adapted as a 1959 film of the same name. Heyward also wrote poetry and other novels and plays.

He wrote the children's book The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (1939).

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Childhood, education, and early career

Heyward was born in 1885 in Charleston, South Carolina, and the son of Jane Screven (DuBose) and Edwin Watkins Heyward. He was a descendant of Judge Thomas Heyward, Jr., a signer to the United States Declaration of Independence in South Carolia, and his wife, who were also members of the planter class.

Heyward, a young boy and young adult, was often sick. When he was 18 years old, he contracted polio. He had typhoid fever two years ago and the following year, he was sick with pleurisy. He referred to himself as a "dumpster" who was uninterested in learning. In his first year at age fourteen, he dropped out of high school but had a lifelong and keen interest in literature. As he became a successful insurance agent, he was able to help himself. Although confined to his sickbed, he wrote a number of verses and stories.

An Artistic Triumph, a one-act play that was staged in a local theater in 1913, was performed by Heyward. Despite being described as a derivative work with no promise, Heyward was encouraged enough to pursue a literary career. In 1917, when convalescing, he began to write seriously in fiction and poetry. In 1918, he published his first short story, "The Brute," in Pagan, a Eudaemonist magazine.

Hervey Allen, a student at the Porter Military Academy, was teaching at the nearby Porter Military Academy last year. They became close friends and founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina. It was a catalyst that ignited a revival of southern literature. Heyward edited the society's yearbooks until 1924 and wrote a significant portion of it. His poetry was well-reced, winning him the "Contemporary Verse" award in 1921.

Carolina Chansons: Legends of the Low Country, he and Allen jointly published a book in 1922. They co-authored an issue of Poetry magazine that featured Southern writers. During that time, Heyward and his buddy Henry T. O'Neill operated a profitable insurance and real estate firm jointly.

Career as full-time writer

Heyward had a degree of financial independence by 1924, allowing him to abandon industry and devote his entire time to literature. Jasbo Brown and Other Poems (1924), his first poetry collection, was published that year. He supplemented his income by lecturing on southern literature at colleges and the Porter Military Academy, during his writing stints.

Porgy, a novel set in the black neighborhood of Charleston, which attracted a large number of Gullah people, was released in 1925. Given the book's critical reception, he and Dorothy, a playwright, adapted it as a dramatic performance. He was approached by composer George Gershwin, who suggested collaborating on an opera of the material while doing research on the project.

Porgy, a son and Dorothy's musical theatre company, opened on Broadway in 1927 and was a huge success, with 367 performances.

Heyward, the African-American poet and playwright Langston Hughes, said he saw "with his white eyes, amazing, poetic qualities in the inhabitants of Catfish Row that makes them come alive." James M. Hutchisson, Heyward's biographer, characterized Porgy as "the first big southern novel to have blacks without condescension" and said that the libretto to Porgy and Bess was mainly Heyward's work. Heyward's portrayal of the Southern blacks in his work has been described as sympathetic by critics.

According to Ellen Noonan,

Both Heyward and Ira Gershwin, the composer's brother and frequent collaborator, assisted in the writing of Porgy and Bess. Heyward received no praise for his service. Stephen Sondheim wrote about In his introduction to Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Changed the Country but Didn't Read the History Books (2003): Embed the Nation But Stephen Sondheim wrote: "In his introduction to the section on DuBose Heyward: Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Country But Missed the History Books (2003).

Porgy and Bess, a Gershwin opera, was performed in 1935, starring top African-American singers and chorus. Large portions of the opera's dialogue had been set to music for the recitatives. Although it was modestly launched, it has since had many revivals, toured Europe, North America, and other continents, and has been lauded as an American operatic masterpiece.

With another novel set in Catfish Row, Mamba's Daughters (1929), Heyward continued to investigate black Charleston. This was also adapted as a play by He and Dorothy.

Heyward wrote Brass Ankle, a 1931 New York play. The term refers to a Southern word for a person of mixed race ancestry, and was long used in a pejorative sense. The play explored issues of mixed race, starring two people in a small southern town who grew up believing they were white and learning about some African-American ancestry. Reviewers lauded his work as a "tragic mulatto" film, but it was not a commercial success.

He wrote the screenplay for Eugene O'Neill's film adaptation of The Emperor Jones (1933). Heyward wrote The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (1939), a children's book that was extremely popular.

In Saint Croix, United States Virgin Islands, his novella Star Spangled Virgin (1939) was set. It concerns Adam Work's domestic life and his partner Rhoda. It was described as "singularly charming and very original" in the case of "the gender relations."

Heyward died in June 1940, in Tryon, North Carolina, at the age of 54.

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