MARGARET WALKER (1915-1998) was one of America's most popular and respected African American writers and scholars. She first gained national recognition with the 1942 poetry collection For My People, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her novel Jubilee, which became a national bestseller. Among the most formidable literary voices to emerge in the twentieth century, she will be remembered as one of the foremost transcribers of African American heritage.