In the history of the African-American literary tradition, perhaps no author has been immersed in the formal history of that tradition than Gloria Naylor. As an undergraduate student of Afro-American literature at Brooklyn College and a graduate student of Afro-American studies at Yale, Naylor has analyzed the works of her male and female antecedents in a manner that was impossible before the late seventies. And, while she is a citizen of the republic of literature in the broadest and most cosmopolitan sense, her work suggest formal linkage to that of Ann Petry, James Baldwin, and, more recently, Toni Morrison.

-- from the Preface by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.