Campbell has chosen a path long traveled by novelists: creating fast-paced, readable fiction directed to a wide audience. Like Terry McMillan, with whom she is sometimes compared, Campbell explores relationships both between men and women and between women. Her characters are often upwardly mobile professionals. But her fiction has a complexity far beyond its surface appearance and moves in directions that distinguish her from McMillan. An ethnographic journalist, she depicts cultural events in a journalistic style. She is preoccupied with relationships between blacks and whites and often places her fiction within an historical context. Moreover, Campbell's fiction faces problems within the black community, including urban blight, drugs, gangs, single teenage mothers, and absent fathers. She insists that African Americans need to take at least partial responsibility for solving these problems.
Bebe Moore was born to Doris and George Linwood Peter Moore in Philadelphia on 18 February 1950. Her parents separated while she was still an infant, and she and her mother went to live with her maternal grandmother, also of Philadelphia. Her mother's grandparents, who had been sharecroppers in Virginia, migrated north when Bebe's grandmother was a baby, while her father's family remained in the South. As Campbell puts it in her memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad (1989), she was raised in "a household where capable and loving women made sure that I had both culture and Christianity, that I greased my legs and learned the difference between nice children and riffraff, that I was proper." Both her parents were college educated, her father at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College and her mother at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees.
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