[1] When she was 14 she began writing a column about young people for the Pittsburgh Courier and continued to do so until 1952, the year after she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her bachelor's degree in Education (1951).
[3] Her first and most acclaimed novel, God Bless the Child, was published in 1964, and won the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award.
Her 1973 collection of short stories, Guests in the Promised Land, was nominated for the National Book Award.
My early work was 'objective,' that is, sympathetic to both whites and blacks, and seeing members of both groups from a perspective of irony and humor against the wider backdrop of human experience as a whole.
Since about 1968 my subjective anger has been emerging, along with my grasp of the real situation in this society, though my sense of humor and my basic optimism keep cropping up like uncontrollable weeds.