"This Child’s Gonna Live"

1969

In 1969, with the publication of her only novel This Child’s Gonna Live, Sarah E. Wright helped lay the groundwork for an upsurge in creative writings by contemporary African American women writers. The novel is set on the Lower Eastern Shore of Maryland during the 1930s, in a Chesapeake waterway community that mirrored her own birthplace, where watermen, huddled in oyster boats and warmed by oil lamps, made their living on inlets of the Chesapeake Bay. Her writing examines disturbing issues related to race, religion, gender, class, and sexuality—critical themes that represent commonplace concerns explored in African American literature.