Author Rosa Guy Dies at age 89: Rosa Guy, a Caribbean-born writer known for her unflinchingly direct novels for young people about black life in urban America, died on June 3, 2012 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 89. The cause was cancer. The themes to which she returned repeatedly in her Young Adult books included race, class, poverty, sexuality and simmering tensions between American blacks and Afro-Caribbean immigrants newly arrived in the United States. Of her books for young adults, the best known was a trilogy of novels, The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976) and Edith Jackson (1978). The books drew partly on Ms. Guy’s experience as a young immigrant from Trinidad, coming of age in New York without money, parents or stability. The Friends centers on the sometimes wary alliance between two teenage schoolmates: Phyllisia Cathy, an educated West Indian immigrant, and Edith Jackson, a poor, street-smart African-American born and reared in Harlem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/rosa-guy-89-author-of-forthright-novels-for-young-people.html?_r=2&ref=obituaries.
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