Naylor was born in New York on January 25, 1950, the oldest child of Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. The Naylors, who had been sharecroppers in Robinsonville, Mississippi, had migrated to Harlem to escape life in the segregated South and seek new opportunities in New York City.[1] Her father became a transit worker; her mother, a telephone operator. Even though Naylor's mother had little education, she loved to read, and encouraged her daughter to read and keep a journal.[2] Before her teen years, Gloria began writing prodigiously, filling many notebooks with observations, poems, and short stories.[3]
In 1963, Naylor's family moved to Queens and her mother joined the Jehovah's Witnesses. An outstanding student who read voraciously, Naylor was placed into advanced classes in high school, where she immersed herself in the work of nineteenth-century British novelists. Her educational aspirations, however, were delayed by the shock of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in her senior year. She decided to postpone her college education, becoming a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, and Florida instead. She left seven years later as "things weren't getting better, but worse."[4]
From 1975 to 1981, Naylor attended Medgar Evers College and then Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, while working as a telephone operator, majoring in nursing before switching to English, earning her bachelor's degree in 1981.[4] It was at that time that she read Toni Morrison's 1970 novel The Bluest Eye, which was a pivotal experience for Naylor. She began to avidly read the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and other black women novelists, none of which she had been exposed to previously. She went on to earn an M.A. degree in African-American studies at Yale University in 1983; her thesis eventually became her second published novel, Linden Hills.[3]
Naylor was an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
