Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara is a well-known and respected civil rights activist, professor of English and African American studies, editor of two anthologies of black literature, and author of short stories and novels. According to Alice A. Deck in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "In many ways Toni Cade Bambara is one of the best representatives of the group of Afro-American writers who, during the 1960s, became directly involved in the cultural and sociopolitical activities in urban communities across the country." Deck points out that "Bambara is one of the few who continued to work within the black urban communities (filming, lecturing, organizing, and reading from her works at rallies and conferences), producing imaginative reenactments of these experiences in her fiction. In addition, Bambara established herself over the years as an educator, teaching in colleges and independent community schools in various cities on the East Coast."

Bambara's first two books of fiction, Gorilla, My Love and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, are collections of her short stories. Susan Lardner remarks in the New Yorker that the stories in these two works, "describing the lives of black people in the North and the South, could be more exactly typed as vignettes and significant anecdotes, although a few of them are fairly long.... All are notable for their purposefulness, a more or less explicit inspirational angle, and a distinctive motion of the prose, which swings from colloquial narrative to precarious metaphorical heights and over to street talk, at which Bambara is unbeatable."

In a review of Gorilla, My Love, for example, a writer assesses in the Saturday Review that the stories "are among the best portraits of black life to have appeared in some time. [They are] written in a breezy, engaging style that owes a good deal to street dialect." A critic writing in Newsweek makes a similar observation of the author's second collection of short stories, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, commenting, "Bambara directs her vigorous sense and sensibility to black neighborhoods in big cities, with occasional trips to small Southern towns.... The stories start and stop like rapid-fire conversations conducted in a rhythmic, black-inflected, sweet-and-sour language." In fact, according to Anne Tyler in the Washington Post Book World, Bambara's particular style of narration is one of the most distinctive qualities of her writing. "What pulls us along is the language of [her] characters, which is startlingly beautiful without once striking a false note," notes Tyler. "Everything these people say, you feel, ordinary, real-life people are saying right now on any street corner. It's only that the rest of us didn't realize it was sheer poetry they were speaking."

In terms of plot, Bambara tends to avoid linear development in favor of presenting "situations that build like improvisations of a melody," as a Newsweek reviewer explains. Bell Gale Chevigny in the Village Voice observes that despite the "often sketchy" plots in Gorilla, My Love, the stories are always "lavish in their strokesÐ'--here are elaborate illustrations, soaring asides, aggressive sub-plots. They are never didactic, but they abound in far-out common sense, exotic home truths."

Numerous reviewers have also remarked on Bambara's sensitive portrayals of her characters and the handling of their situations, portrayals that are marked by an affectionate warmth and pride. Laura Marcus writes in the Times Literary Supplement that Bambara "presents black culture as embattled but unbowed.... Bambara depicts black communities in which ties of blood and friendship are fiercely defended." In addition, Deck remarks that "the basic implication of all of