Porgy’s Ghost: The Life and Works of Dorothy Heyward and Her Contribution to an American Classic

On the world stage, the opera Porgy and Bess is acclaimed as a distinctively American, yet universal, classic. Though scholars and the popular press have discussed it for nearly one hundred years, no one has factored in the major contributions of one of its forgotten authors--until now. Besides serving as a brief biography that illuminates Dorothy Heyward’s personal and professional life, which ranges from lighthearted whimsy to a descent into madness, what emerges in Porgy’s Ghost is a correction to a longstanding omission of Dorothy Heyward’s influence on Porgy, the novel written by her husband; Porgy, the play, mostly her creation; and Porgy and Bess, the opera often credited solely to George and Ira Gershwin. Fighting to restore her husband DuBose Heyward’s name to that work, she hid her own contributions to maximize his. Based on years of research in her archives and previously unknown materials, author Harlan Greene reveals a cypher of a woman who, in her lifetime and long after, was dismissed as unimportant.

HARLAN GREENE is emeritus Scholar in Residence at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library. Previously its head of Special Collections and the director of Archival Services at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, he founded the archives at the Charleston County Public Library and worked in the college’s Jewish archives and created its LGBTQ archives. Greene is chair of Charleston’s Historical Commission and is a frequent lecturer, interviewed by national and international media on various cultural topics relating to the Carolina Lowcountry. An award-winning novelist, he has also authored several nonfiction works, including Charleston: City of Memory and Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance (Georgia). He is the coeditor of Renaissance in Charleston: Art and Life in the Carolina Low Country, 1900-1940 (Georgia) and coauthor of Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina, 1783-1865.