The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk

She was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, the only surviving child of a shoeshine man and a maid. She read voraciously, wrote her first stories at ten, attended Pasadena City College on a scholarship, took a Clarion Writers Workshop summer course in 1970, sold her first story to Galaxy Science Fiction in 1971, and over twelve novels and the Patternist, Xenogenesis, and Parable trilogies became the first African-American woman to win the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and the first science-fiction writer to win the MacArthur Fellowship. She died on February 24, 2006, at fifty-eight, of a fall outside her Lake Forest Park, Washington, home.

Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier — in the Pasadena childhood and the shyness that lasted her whole life — and follows the arc through the Pasadena City College years, the Clarion summer, the Kindred (1979) novel that opened the door, the long Patternist series, the Xenogenesis trilogy that the 1980s science-fiction community could not at first absorb, the 1995 MacArthur, the Parable novels and the unfinished Parable of the Trickster, the move to Seattle in 1999, and the morning of February 24, 2006.

What emerges is a portrait of an African-American science-fiction writer whose books the genre took thirty years to figure out how to read — and whose work the post-2016 American political situation has made the canonical literature of the moment.