Bebe Moore Campbell, a best-selling novelist known for her empathetic treatment of the difficult, intertwined and occasionally surprising relationship between the races, died Monday of complications of brain cancer at her home in Los Angeles. She was 56.
With writers like Terry McMillan, Ms. Campbell was part of the first wave of novelists who made the lives of upwardly mobile black people a routine subject for popular fiction. Straddling the divide between literary and mass-market novels, her work explored not only the turbulent dance between blacks and whites but also the equally fraught relationship between men and women.
Throughout her work, Ms. Campbell sought to counter prevailing stereotypes of black people as socially and economically marginal. Though some critics occasionally faulted her characters as two-dimensional, others compared the importance of her work to that of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Her novels, known for their appeal to blacks and whites alike, were filled with, as she once said, “flawed people trying to get their healing.”
Ms. Campbell's perceptive writing led to a career as a regular commentator for National Public Radio's “Morning Edition” and frequent guest appearances on ABC's “Nightline,” and other radio and television talk shows.
With the publication of her most recent novel, “72 Hour Hold” (Knopf, 2005), she also became a visible spokeswoman on mental-health issues. The novel, about bipolar disorder, was inspired by the experience of a family member, Ms. Campbell said.
Originally a schoolteacher and later a journalist, she made her mark as a writer of fiction with her first novel, “Your Blues Ain't Like Mine” (Putnam), published in 1992. Rooted in the story of Emmett Till, the book tells of a black Chicago youth killed by a white man in Mississippi in 1955 after saying the wrong thing to a white woman. After the murderer is acquitted at trial, the narrative follows his increasing dissolution. Ms. Campbell said she wanted “to give racism a face” by exploring what subsequently happens in the families of the murdered youth and his slayer.
“African-Americans know about racism, but I don't think we really know the causes. I decided it's first of all a family problem,” Ms. Campbell said in an interview with The New York Times Book Review in 1992.
Ms. Campbell's other novels, all published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, are “Brothers and Sisters” (1994), written in the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992; “Singing in the Comeback Choir” (1998), about a black television producer feeling cut off from her roots; and “What You Owe Me” (2001), about the friendship between two women, one African-American, the other a Jewish Holocaust survivor, in the 1940s.
Elizabeth Bebe Moore was born in Philadelphia on Feb. 18, 1950, to parents who divorced when she was very young. Bebe spent each school year in Philadelphia with her mother, grandmother and aunt – strong, upright women she collectively called “the Bosoms” – who set her on a course of study, discipline and staunch middle-class respectability.
She spent summers in North Carolina with her father, who had been paralyzed in an automobile accident. There, she was enveloped in a heady world of beer, laughter and cigar smoke. She documented her contrasting lives in her memoir, “Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad” (Putnam, 1989).
Ms. Campbell's first marriage, to Tiko Campbell, ended in divorce. She is survived by: her husband, Ellis Gordon Jr., whom she married in 1984; her mother, Doris Moore of Los Angeles; a daughter from her first marriage, Maia Campbell of Los Angeles; a stepson, Ellis Gordon III of Mitchellville, Md.; and two grandchildren.
Despite the subject matter of her books, Ms. Campbell expressed hope about the future of American race relations. In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, she described her motivation for writing “Brothers and Sisters,” the story of the friendship between a black banker and her white colleague.
“It was my attempt to bridge a racial gap,” she said. “That's the story that never gets told: how many of us really like each other, respect each other.”
The Washington Post contributed to this report.
