Pecola Breedlove is a young girl growing up black and poor in the early 1940s. She is repeatedly called "ugly" by nearly everyone in her life, from the mean kids at school to her own mother. This c...

Claudia is the primary narrator of the book. An inquisitive, sensitive young girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio, Claudia is the product of a loving family. Her narration is interesting in that it move...

Cholly is a complex character, with a difficult life that is closely tied to America's racist history. He's got major issues with women, which stem partially from the fact that his mother abandoned...

Pauline is Pecola's mom, and her character allows us to see how cultural conceptions of beauty can play themselves out in a more benign, though still unfortunate, form than in Pecola's case.Pauline...

Maureen is a snobby, uppity light-skinned girl with money who is new to the neighborhood. Maureen comes to symbolize a different kind of black family – the upwardly mobile, light-skinned Afri...

Miss Marie challenges some of the characters' conceptions of beauty and feminine decorum. Always eating, cursing, or laughing, she refuses to abide by society's rules regarding the so-called purity...

Soaphead is the novel's quintessential dirty old man. He internalizes his family's obsession with whiteness but takes it in a surprisingly pedophilic direction. Just as Pecola associates whiteness...