"I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.""Life is accepting what is and working from that.""Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.""Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.""One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.""Spoiled. That's all it's about - can't live without this, can't live without that. You can live without anything you weren't born with, and you can make it through on even half of that."
Born in New York City, she was the first child to Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. As Naylor grew up, her father was a transit worker and her mother was a telephone operator. When Naylor was young, her mother encouraged her to read and keep a journal. Even though her mother barely had any education, she loved to read and often worked overtime in the fields as a sharecropper to produce enough money to join a book club.
In 1963 she moved to Queens with her family. Five years later Naylor followed in her mother's footsteps and became a Jehovah's Witness, but she left seven years later as ”things weren't getting better, but worse.”
Education
Naylor earned her bachelor’s degree in English at Brooklyn College. Afterward, she attended Yale University in order to obtain her master’s degree in Afro—American Studies.
Naylor's novel The Women of Brewster Place was first published in 1982. It was adapted into a 1989 film of the same name by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions.
During her career as a professor, she taught writing and literature at several universities. She has taught at George Washington University, New York University, Boston University, and Cornell University.