Wilson (“ Our Nig”) and Hannah Crafts (“ The Bondwoman’s Narrative”), and assembled the thirty-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Gates also unearthed and brought forward nineteenth-century texts by African American authors including Harriet E. In “ The Signifying Monkey,” he employed the tools of post-structuralism and semiotics to bear on both the vernacular tradition and authors as varied as Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed. Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1986, helped convince Gates to study African and African American literature.Īs a literary critic, Gates made an impact on the field by helping to establish a canon of African American literature-one that was neither separatist nor a mere appendage to the traditional, white canon. The English faculty at Cambridge did not take African literature seriously, according to Gates, relegating it to anthropology. Gates was also fascinated by the trial of Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panthers at a courthouse near campus, and joined in the student strike in solidarity.Īfter graduating from Yale, he went, on a fellowship, to study at the University of Cambridge, where his most important mentor was Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, essayist, and novelist.

His awakening did not take place only in the classroom and university meeting hall.

In New Haven, he began to explore the depths of African American literature and history. After a year at Potomac State College, Gates transferred to Yale, which was starting to open up to a sizable number of Black students. Town picnics were still segregated but, with the advent of Brown v. Board of Education, the schools were not.

Gates was born in 1950 and grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, where his family has deep roots. Still, I don’t think it requires the prejudice of friendship to believe that Gates, who is now seventy-one, has left a lasting, multiform imprint on the culture. We’ve known each other first as colleagues at The New Yorker, where he wrote the Profiles that make up his collection “ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,” and then as friends. It’s important to say it up front: I can’t claim to approach Henry Louis Gates, Jr.-or Skip, as he’s known-as a subject of objective journalistic inquiry.

Richard Wright by Henry Louis Gates Jr.