Porgy (novel)

Porgy is a novel written by the American author DuBose Heyward and published by the George H. Doran Company in 1925.

The novel tells the story of Porgy, a crippled street-beggar in the black tenements of Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1920s. The character was based on the real-life Charlestonian Samuel Smalls. Some passages in the novel have the characters speaking in the Gullah language.

The novel was adapted for a 1927 play by Heyward and his wife, playwright Dorothy Heyward. Even before the play had been fully written, Heyward was in discussions with George Gershwin for an operatic version of his novel, which appeared in 1935 as Porgy and Bess (renamed to distinguish it from the play).