76 Church St
Charleston, SC 29401, USA

National Register of Historic Places - DuBose Heyvard House

Statement of Significant:

The historical significance of DuBose Heyward rests primarily on his novel, Porgy, which inspired the famed folk opera Porgy and Bess. In this novel, Heyward chose for his setting the Negro community of Charleston, and for his protagonist a crippled beggar whose struggle he treated with sensitivity and insight. The result was a dramatic story which has attained the status of a national legend.

Heyward lived at number 76 Church Street from approximately 1919 to 1924.1 House has been substantially altered, and now serves as a wing of the house which it adjoins.

Biography
DuBose Heyward was born into an aristocratic family in Charleston, South Carolina, on August 31, 1885. When DuBose was two years old, his father died in an accident, and he was left the only man in a family of four. His family suffered poverty, and in order to help the boy began selling newspapers at age nine. When he was fourteen, he left school entirely to work as a clerk in a hardware store. At the end of two years of heavy work, he was stricken with poliomyelitis; although he recovered his hands were never completely normal. After his recovery, he worked on the Charleston waterfront as a cotton warehouse checker. This job brought him into constant daily contact with the waterfront Negroes; and he later used the knowledge which he gained of their characters and life style in his writing. At age 22, he went into the insurance business but found his artistic need a real one, so nine years later, he moved into the North Carolina mountains where he began to paint and write poems.

Mr. Heyward was rejected for military service in World War I because of his health. Instead, he stayed in Charleston and did organization work among Negroes and worked on his poetry. After the armistice, through his acquaintance with John Bennett, he met Hervey Allen, who later gained fame as the author of Anthony Adverse. These three men founded the South Carolina Poetry Society which helped stimulate the Southern literary renaissance. Allen and Heyward also collaborated on a book of poems dealing with legends and landscapes of Charleston which was published in 1922 under the title Carolina Chansons.

During the summer of 1919, DuBose Heyward met Dorothy Hartnell Kahns, a drama student at Harvard, at the McDowell Artists' Colony in Petersborough New Hampshire. They were married in ,1923, and in 1924 he published his second volume of poetry. Skylines and Horizons.

Shortly after his marriage, Heyward sold his interest in the insurance business in Charleston and moved to the North Carolina Mountains where he began to write Porgy (1925). Porgy won instant recognition. It was referred to as the first novel written about the character of an American Negro which was at once true to life and a work of art. Mr. and Mrs. Heyward worked together on the dramatization of Porgy and the play was produced on Broadway in 1927.

Among Heyward's other books are Angel (1926), The Half-Pint Flask (1929), Mamba’s Daughters (1929), produced in 1939 as a play, Jasbo Brown and Selected Poems (1931), Peter Ashley (1932), Brass Ankle U931), Lost Morning (1936), and Star-Spangled Virgin (1937). But it is Porgy which he is remembered for today. It is Porgy that grew from a novel, to a play, to the first American folk opera Porgy and Bess which DuBose wrote in collaboration with George Gershwin.

Mr. Heyward spent the last years of his life aiding in the restoration of the historic Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, South Carolina, and in using it as a base to revive Southern Theatre. He spent the last year of his life as resident playwright to the Dock Street Theatre where he surrounded himself with promising dramatists who he aided and advised. He died of a heart attack, at Tryon, North Carolina, at the age of fifty-four.

DuBose Heyward began as a poet. In fact, he, along with John Bennett and Hervey Allen founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina in 1920, The society contributed to the development of poets, poetry, and an appreciative public. Yet his early poetic work with the exception of two poems, "The Mountain Woman" and "A Yoke of Steers," is notable only because it served is preparation for Heyward's later narrative and dramatic works with the exception of Mamba's Daughters (1929).

Heyward's later dramatic works failed to measure up to the brilliance of Porgy (1925). In fairness, however, one must remember that as an artist Heyward constantly set himself new problems to solve and that experimentation was more important to him than was box office success. DuBose Heyward's claim to fame is Porgy (1925), and it is a solid claim. As Frank Durham wrote:

Since Porgy's first appearance more than a quarter of a century ago, Americans and people everywhere have known and loved the story of the little cripple with his odoriferous goat and his one triumphant summer of love, heroism, and tragedy. – When Porgy appeared in 1925, it was unique in our national letters because it presented the Southern Negro as a human being and not a pathetic character introduced in the story to provide comic relief nor as a subject for social propaganda. Porgy is also an example of local color at its best for it records a way of life fading into the past.

Porgy at last became Porgy and Bees, the first American folk opera to win widespread recognition. Therefore, DuBose Heyward's Porgy is an enduring contribution to American letters, theater, and opera. Again, Frank Durham states:

But most of all Porgy has become a part of native folklore, its characters and their romantic story having gradually so embedded themselves into the group consciousness that the name of their creator is almost forgotten.

76 Church St (House), Charleston, Charleston County, SC

HABS SC-452