Porgy

2021 Reprint of the 1925 Edition.  Facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The novel tells the story of Porgy, a crippled street beggar living in the black tenements of Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1920s. The character was based on Charlestonian Samuel Smalls.  In some of the novel's passages, black characters speak in Gullah, a creole language that had developed among enslaved African Americans during the slavery years on the Sea Islands.

The novel was adapted for a 1927 play of the same name by Heyward and his wife, playwright Dorothy Heyward. Even before completing the play, Heyward was in discussions with composer George Gershwin for an operatic version of his novel. This was produced in 1935 as Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin read Porgy in 1926 and proposed to Heyward to collaborate on an operatic version. In 1934, Gershwin and Heyward began work on the project by visiting the author's native Charleston, South Carolina. In a 1935 New York Times article, Gershwin explained his motivation for calling Porgy and Bess a folk opera:

  "Porgy and Bess is a folk tale. Its people naturally would sing folk music. When I first began work on the music, I decided against the use of original folk material because I wanted the music to be all of one piece. Therefore, I wrote my own spirituals and folksongs. But they are still folk music-and therefore, being in operatic form, Porgy and Bess becomes a folk opera."