Vyry Brown, the unacknowledged daughter of the planter John Dutton and of Hetta, the enslaved woman he keeps, is raised in the Dutton plantation's kitchen in Georgia, freed by the Civil War she experiences as rumor and then as armies, and married twice — first to Randall Ware, a freeborn blacksmith lost to her in the war's chaos, then to Innes Wakefield, with whom she rebuilds through flood, debt, and Ku Klux Klan terror into Reconstruction. Walker built Vyry from the life of her own great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, as her grandmother had told it to her; the novel took more than two decades to write, served as her University of Iowa doctoral dissertation, and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. Each of its fifty-eight chapters opens with a proverb or a line from a spiritual.
Author: Margaret Walker · Original publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston), 1966
