DuBose Heyward

Edwin DuBose Heyward (August 31, 1885 – June 16, 1940) was an American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy. He and his wife Dorothy, a playwright, adapted it as a 1927 play of the same name. The couple worked with composer George Gershwin to adapt the work as the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. It was later adapted as a 1959 film of the same name.

• Porgy lived in the Golden Age. Not the Golden Age of a remote and legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past middle life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed.
  • Porgy (1925), pt. 1

• You could not give me toys in those bleak days;
  So when my playmates proudly boasted theirs,
  You caught me to the shelter of your arms,
  And taught me how to laugh away my tears.
  • "Your Gifts"

• It is cruel for a woman with her man gone,
  An' the younguns allus hungry, an' winter comin' on.
  • "Black Christmas"

• Compassionate the mountains rise
  Dim with the wistful dimness of old eyes
  That, having looked on life time out of mind,
  Know that the simple gift of being kind
  Is greater than all the wisdom of the wise.
  • "Evening in the Great Smokies"

• Here lies a spendthrift who believed
     That only those who spend may keep;
  Who scattered seeds, yet never grieved
     Because a stranger came to reap.
  • "Epitaph for a Poet"

• Hervey Allen
• Ira Gershwin