Her debut novel, “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” was a searing examination of Black life in Depression-era Harlem.
The novelist Louise Meriwether at a celebration of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize in 2017. The honor was created a year earlier by the Feminist Press and TAYO Literary Magazine for debut works by female or nonbinary authors of color. Louise Meriwether, an author and activist who helped propel a renaissance of Black female writing in the 1970s with her searing novel “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” a coming-of-age story set in Depression-era Harlem, died Oct.
“They was acting the fool as usual, their knickers hanging loose, their caps on backward, whistling at the girls and falling out at their own jokes. As I watched them they didn’t seem so bad all of a sudden, just full of fun, and I didn’t want them to fall off the roof or cut each other or be hauled off to jail but just to stay there, safe and sound forever, laughing in front of the drugstore.”“I wanted to hug them all,” she adds. “We belonged to each other somehow.
After falling out of circulation, the novel was reissued by the Feminist Press in 2002. It has since been cited as a key influence on younger generations of writers, including Bridgett M. Davis and Jacqueline Woodson.While attention came and went, Ms.
“They had no Black writers,” she later said. “There was no opportunity to do what I wanted to do, which would have been to write screenplays. They let the door open that far, and that was it.”Ms. Meriwether left the studio after a few years and was working with the Watts Writers Workshop in South Los Angeles when she began drafting “Daddy Was a Number Runner.
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