Sarah Phillips.

About Sarah Phillips

Sarah Phillips is a 1984 novel written by American writer Andrea Lee. The novel takes place in Philadelphia in the period after the civil rights movement, and centers the protagonist, Sarah Phillips, born in 1953, a daughter of a black middle-class family living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. From a first-person narrative point of view, Sarah offers chronological snapshots of her and her family's lives. She illuminates realities of middle-class Black American life, particularly around the time after the Civil Rights Movement via fictionalized stories. A later version of the book begins with a foreword by Valerie Smith. She talks about her experiences teaching this novel in her own class, and how her students did not take a liking to the protagonist, Sarah Phillips. She then contextualizes the novel, which actually began as a set of short stories debuted in The New Yorker, published during a period in which the black middle class rose in numbers. Sarah Phillips, Smith says, is in a lot of ways everything that her predecessors, both in terms of fictional characters like her and real world individuals who identified with her story, could dream of: being black and middle class, achieving success in the eyes of white America.