[3] Her best known work is the novel Mojo Hand, first published in 1966, the story of a light-skinned upper-class young woman from San Francisco, California, who after hearing a record by bluesman Blacksnake Brown seeks him out and becomes embroiled in an ultimately tragic relationship with him.
"[1] Phillips studied at Immaculate Heart College, where as a freshman in 1962 she became interested in black roots music and travelled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to join the civil rights movement.
[1] She worked on a National Student Association voter-registration campaign and later joined a Congress of Racial Equality-sit-in at a Howard Johnson's restaurant, where she was arrested, spending 30 days in the county jail before returning to California.
[10] In speaking about the origins of Mojo Hand, and setting out to tell "a story of one person's journey from a non-racialized state to the racialized real world", as was happening to her, Phillips said: "I realized that the perfect vehicle for effecting this was my own bluesy Orphic quest, which I developed after I had seen Marcel Camus's classic film Black Orpheus several times, and which led me to Lightnin'.
In addition, I'd come under the influence of the existentialists and outlaw writers, such as Henry Miller, Genet, Sartre, as well as Richard Wright, and I was irresistibly drawn to the idea of the anti-hero and the bad boy in literature and life.