DuBose Heyward
Musician · 1885–1940 · Charleston, South Carolina
Best known for
Songwriter
DuBose Heyward was a Charleston-born novelist and lyricist whose 1925 novel Porgy — based on the Black community of Catfish Row — he adapted with his wife Dorothy into the 1927 stage play and, with composer George Gershwin and lyricist Ira Gershwin, into the 1935 American folk opera Porgy and Bess. Heyward wrote most of the opera’s libretto and large portions of its lyrics, including “Summertime.”
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- Born Edwin DuBose Heyward on August 31, 1885, in Charleston, South Carolina, to a once-wealthy family descended from Declaration of Independence signer Thomas Heyward Jr.
- Worked as a Charleston insurance broker before achieving financial independence in 1924; co-founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina in 1920, the first regional poetry society in America.
- Published Jasbo Brown and Other Poems in 1924.
- Published the novel Porgy in 1925, drawing on Catfish Row, the Charleston African-American neighborhood near his childhood home.
- Adapted Porgy into a hit Broadway play with his wife Dorothy in 1927.
- Wrote the libretto and most of the lyrics — including “Summertime” — for George and Ira Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess.
- Stephen Sondheim later called Heyward’s Porgy and Bess texts “the finest set of lyrics in the history of the American musical theater.”
- Wrote a second Catfish Row novel, Mamba’s Daughters, in 1929.
- Died of a heart attack in Tryon, North Carolina on June 16, 1940, at age 54.
