Porgy is a novel written by the American author DuBose Heyward and published by the George H. Doran Company in 1925. The novel tells the story of Porgy, a crippled street-beggar in the black tenements of Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1920s. The character was based on the real-life Charlestonian Samuel Smalls. Some passages in the novel have the characters speaking in the Gullah language.