DuBose Heyward

DuBose Heyward was a Charleston poet and novelist, from an impoverished branch of a grand South Carolina family. He left school at fourteen, survived polio, and worked on the waterfront, then in insurance; with Hervey Allen he founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, an early centre of the Southern literary revival. His novel Porgy, drawn from the Black tenement life he had watched around Cabbage Row, became a bestseller, then a Theatre Guild play written with his wife Dorothy, and finally the opera, for which he wrote most of the libretto and, with Ira Gershwin, several of its lyrics.