Porgy

Heyward was a versatile artist equally at ease with verse, short fiction, novels, plays, and Hollywood screenwriting. He and his wife Dorothy helped to energize the nascent black theater movement in New York.
The novel tells the story of Porgy, a crippled street beggar living in the black tenements of Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1920s. We follow him as he woos Bess and for one shining moment becomes all that he has ever imagined himself capable of being before losing everything. Gripping and sympathetic a glimpse into Charleston’s past. Adapted in George Gershwin's masterpiece Porgy and Bess.
With his white eyes, wonderful, poetic qualities in the inhabitants of Catfish Row make them come alive. —Langston Hughes
The first major southern novel to portray blacks without condescension —James M. Hutchisson