African-American novelist who examined black life and racial relations in the United States in both children's stories and works for adults.
Hunter began writing for The Pittsburgh Courier, an important black newspaper, when she was 14 and continued until the year after she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1951). While working as an advertising copywriter, she won a 1955 national television contest with her script Minority of One, about black-white school integration; fearing controversy, the network rewrote the story to show a French-speaking immigrant entering an all-white school. In Hunter's first and best-known novel, God Bless the Child (1964), three generations of women confront choices forced upon them by their skin tones.
Despite harshly realistic settings, Hunter's subsequent fiction tended to optimism. The Landlord (1966; filmed 1970) presents a misanthropic white landlord transformed by his new black tenants. In The Survivors (1975), a lonely, prosperous middle-aged dressmaker befriends a neglected 13-year-old boy despite his involvement with dishonest, sometimes brutal, acquaintances. Her first book for young readers, The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou (1968), is about a musical group inspired by a group of youths who sang together nightly in the alley below her apartment. Its sequel was Lou in the Limelight (1981). She has also written Boss Cat (1971) and the short-story collection Guests in the Promised Land (1973) for young readers.