Obituary: Sherley Anne Williams

THE PULITZER Prize and National Book Award nominee Sherley Anne Williams, author of The Peacock Poems and Dessa Rose, might never have achieved literary success had she listened to her mother.

"I think she felt reading wasn't a skill I needed to have to the excess I was taking it," Williams once said of her mother's response to her childhood passion for reading. "And that it would put ideas in my head beyond the possibility of them being fulfilled, so I would be really dissatisfied with my lot in life."

Sadly, both her parents died long before Williams was able to fulfil her writing ambitions and became an important voice in American literature articulating the African-American experience.

Williams was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1945 and grew up in a poor area on the west side of Fresno, where her family survived on welfare and as migrant workers in cotton fields and in the fruit orchards of the San Joaquin Valley. It was, she said later, "the most deprived, provincial kind of existence you can think of".

Her father died of tuberculosis when she was eight. In high school her love of language developed and a science teacher, seeing promise, encouraged her to apply to college. When she was 16, however, her mother died of a heart attack. To survive, Williams, like her parents, went to work picking cotton.

Education rescued her from the life of grinding poverty that had been her parents' lot. She won a place at Fresno State University and went on to do her masters in American literature at Brown University. In 1973 she joined the literature department at the University of California at San Diego. She received tenure in 1975 and later served as chairwoman of the literature department. Her specialities were African- American literature and fiction writing. She remained at the university until shortly before her death.

"Basically, I have survived my childhood," she said later in her life. "I kind of lucked into this middle-class occupation, and those times I might have fallen and did not get up, there was this middle-class system propping me up."

Whilst still an undergraduate she had discovered the work of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, poets who had been part of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and continued to be significant figures in the development of 20th-century American poetry.

"They were the earliest influences on my writing," Williams said. "I was just captivated by their language, their speech and their character because I always liked the way black people talk. So I wanted to work with that in writing."

In 1975 her first book of poetry, The Peacock Poems, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Her second book of verse, Some One Sweet Angel Chile (1982), was also nominated for a National Book Award and she won an Emmy Award for a tele- vision performance of poems from the collection.

In 1986 she fused her childhood experiences in the cotton fields with historical research to write her critically acclaimed historical novel Dessa Rose. The story of the relationship between a privileged Charleston bride and a young pregnant slave sentenced to die after the birth of her baby began as a short story and took four years to write. The New York Times called it "artistically brilliant, emotionally affecting and totally unforgettable". It has been translated into German, Dutch and French.

In the early Nineties she turned to the theatre, with a one-woman drama, Letters from a New England Negro, and to children's books. Working Cotton, a book for children, won an American Library Association Caldecott Award and a Coretta Scott King Book Award, and was listed among the best books of 1992 by Parents magazine. A second children's book, Girls Together, was published this year. At her tragically early death, from cancer, Williams was working on a sequel to Dessa Rose.

Sherley Anne Williams's mother was wary that reading might raise hopes in her daughter that could not be fulfilled. Ironically, it seems that one of the things Williams had difficulty coming to terms with was the brilliant fulfilment of her early hopes. As she once told an interviewer: "To go from having no prospects at all to having seemingly limitless opportunity - well, in my case, I feel I just wasn't prepared for seemingly limitless opportunity."

Peter Guttridge

Sherley Anne Williams, poet, novelist and teacher: born Bakersfield, California 25 August 1944; Assistant Professor of Literature, University of California at San Diego 1973-75, Professor of Literature 1975-99; (one son); died San Diego, California 6 July 1999.