Mildred DeLois Taylor (born September 13, 1943) is an award winning African-American children's author whose works focus on life in the Deep South and the struggles faced by African-Americans during the early 20th Century. These works center around the Logan family of Mississippi, and are known collectively as the Logan Family Saga.
Works
- Song Of The Trees (1975)
- Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976)
- Let The Circle Be Unbroken (1981)
- The Gold Cadillac (1987)
- The Friendship (1987)
- Mississippi Bridge (1990)
- The Road To Memphis (1992)
- The Well Davids Story (1995)
- The Land (2001)
- All The Days Past All The Days To Come (2020)
Tropes associated with her work
- Anachronic Order: The books were published in a very different order from the order they took place in, with only one book — the last one published — matching both publishing order and in-universe chronological order. In-universe, the order is: The Land (2001), The Well (1995), Song of the Trees (1975), Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), Mississippi Bridge (1990), Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981), The Friendship (1987), The Road to Memphis (1990), The Gold Cadillac (1987) and All the Days Past, All the Days to Come (2020).
- Author Avatar: In All The Days Past, All The Days To Come, one of Cassie's nieces who listens to her stories about growing up in the South is a girl named Taylor who goes by 'lois. She even ends up joining the Peace Corps and studying at the University of Toledo to become a writer, just as the author Taylor did.
- A Day in the Limelight: Mississippi Bridge is told from the perspective of the Logan children's white friend Jeremy Simms.
- Been There, Shaped History: During All the Days Past:
- Taylor's niece Rie ends up being amongst the 52 students arrested alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960 Atlanta sit-in protest.
- Solomon Bradley, Taylor's First Love from The Road to Memphis, becomes closely associated with CORE, and both he and Little Man end up participating in freedom rides. Cassie and the other siblings end up initially planning to just follow along without directly participating in order to keep an eye on him, but after Little Man gets arrested, they choose to protest too and end up getting arrested as well.
- Little Willie's son, a freshman at a Jackson, Mississippi high school, is among the high school students who were assaulted by police in 1963.
- Cassie and company happen to be in Medgar Evers' neighborhood the night he was assassinated.
- Car Chase Shoot-Out: In All the Days Past the Logan siblings are chased while driving by Charlie Simms and the Ames brothers, the latter armed with shotguns and the willingness to use them.
- Crapsack World: Taylor pulls no punches on how terrible the South was for anyone who was Black in the 1930s, with the Logans having to constantly deal with the inequities of racism and the knowledge that white people can do just about whatever they want to them and get away with it. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry has in its early chapters Cassie visiting Mr. Berry, a Black man who was burned alive by the Wallaces for the "crime" of allegedly talking to a white woman.
- Distant Finale: The epilogue of All The Days Past, All The Days To Come skips ahead from 1963 all the way to 2009, as a now elderly Cassie buses to Washington to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Song of the Trees is told via rotating POV as opposed to the single viewpoint characters of her later books and is the only book to have another Black person serve as a major antagonist instead of white people.
- Grand Finale: All the Days Past, All the Days to Come is billed as the last book in the Logan family saga, closing the tale of Cassie's story.
- Historical Domain Character: In All the Days Past Mama mentions going to a NAACP speech headed by Medgar Evers.
- Nothing Is the Same Anymore: By the end of All the Days Past, Papa Logan is dead, the original Great Faith Church is purposely burnt down, and Cassie has chosen to stay in Mississippi, where she still lives by the time of Barack Obama's inauguration.
- Prequel: While the second to last book in the Logan family saga in terms of publication, The Land takes place in the post-Reconstruction South and serves as the the origin story for the Logans, showing how they got their titular land.
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Sequel Displacement: Most people don't realize that Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is actually a sequel to the less well known Song of the Trees, the actual first book of The Logan Family Saga. - Sequel Gap: All The Days Past, All The Days To Come was released in 2020, 19 years after The Land was published, and 29 years after The Road To Memphis, the last chronological entry in the entries, was published.
- Write What You Know:
- In general, the books are based on stories Taylor was told from her relatives about Mississippi as she was growing up in Ohio, as while she was born in the state, her family had fled to Ohio when she was three weeks old.
- Paul-Edward Logan, the protagonist of Logan Saga prequel The Land and grandfather of main protagonist Cassie Logan, is a man of mixed white and Black-Native American descent whose white father was a slaveowner. Taylor's own great-grandfather was a man of the exact same background.
