Daddy Was a Number Runner

"A most important novel.”—The New York Times Book Review

A new edition of Louise Meriwether’s classic novel about a young Black girl’s coming-of-age in Harlem in the 1930s, featuring new writing celebrating Meriwether’s life, work, and activism. 

Francie Coffin is the daughter of a number runner, someone who collects bets for the underground lottery that drives Harlem’s secret economy. In Louise Meriwether’s classic novel, we see 1930s Harlem through Francie’s eyes: in laughter and love, in friendships and movies and visits to Abyssinian Church, in whispered conversations between daughters and sons, in awakening political consciousness and resistance, in dream books, in the power to survive under pressure. 

This edition contains the full text of the novel, as well as its foreword by James Baldwin and afterword by Nellie McKay, now expanded to include reactions from newer generations of Black women writers like Bridgett M. Davis, Farah Griffin, and Deesha Philyaw, as well as two newly available interviews on Meriwether's legacy of writing, community, and activism.

Louise Meriwether (1923–2023) was an American novelist, essayist, journalist, and activist as well as a writer of biographies of historically important African Americans for children. She is best known for her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), which draws on autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance.