Background
Paule was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents who had migrated to New York in 1919.
Paule was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents who had migrated to New York in 1919.
Paule was educated at Girls High School, Brooklyn College (1953) and Hunter College, New York (1955).
Early in her career, Paule wrote poetry, but later returned to prose, her first novel Brown Girl, Brownstones being published in 1959. In 1965, she was chosen by Langston Hughes to accompany him on a State Department-sponsored world tour, on which they both read their work, which was a boon to her career.
Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' hop, and Yale University before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University. In 1993 she received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Bates College. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
She was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994. Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001. Her memoir, Triangular Road, was published in 2009.
"I realize that it is fashionable now to dismiss the traditional novel as something of an anachronism, but to me, it is still a vital form. Not only does it allow for the kind of full-blown, richly detailed writing that I love... but it permits me to operate on many levels and to explore both the inner state of my characters as well as the worlds beyond them."