08/31/2026
Famed author DuBose Heyward was born on this day in 1885 in Charleston. Though he came from a family that could trace its roots to Thomas Heyward, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, DuBose grew up in financial hardship after his father died when he was just three years old. His mother, Jane Screven Heyward, supported the family by sewing and running a boarding house, and she also began writing and performing Gullah stories she had learned as a child.
As a young man, Heyward worked in insurance, which gave him the financial stability to pursue his true passion: poetry. He helped found the Poetry Society of South Carolina alongside John Bennett and Hervey Allen, an organization credited with sparking the Southern literary renaissance of the early 20th century. In 1925, he published his first novel, "Porgy," drawn from his observations of African American life in Charleston. The story would go on to have an extraordinary afterlife, first adapted for the stage, then into the opera "Porgy and Bess" in 1935, a collaboration with George and Ira Gershwin. Heyward later served as resident dramatist at the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston.
