NEW YORK: Novelist Paule Marshall has died at the age of 90. He was an exuberant and sharpened storyteller who in fiction such as “Daughters” and “Brown Girl, Brownstones” drew upon classic and vernacular literature and her mother’s kitchen conversations to narrate the divides between blacks and whites, men and women and modern and traditional cultures.

Marshall’s son, Evan K. Marshall, said that she died Monday in Richmond, Virginia. She had been suffering from dementia in recent years.

First published in the 1950s, Marshall was for years virtually the only major black woman fiction writer in the U.S., a bridge between Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and others who emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. Calling herself “an unabashed ancestor worshipper,” Marshall was the Brooklyn-born daughter of Barbadian immigrants and wrote lovingly, but not uncritically of her family and other upholders of the ways of their country of origin.

(Agencies)