Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.

September 16, 1950

Teacher, scholar, and writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was born in Keyser, West Virginia. He attended Yale and Clare College, Cambridge, where he received a doctorate in literature in 1979. He taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke before going to Harvard in 1991. Gates came to public attention in 1981 when he received one of the first MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants, and again in 1983, when he published a rediscovered 1859 novel by an African-American woman, Our Nig, the first such work of its kind to be found. His major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1998), links literary analysis with black vernacular expression. Critic Ismael Reed called it "the Rosetta Stone of the American multicultural Renaissance."

Gates emerged in the 1990s as a popularizer of black scholarship and a spokesperson on racial issues. His work in establishing and chairing Harvard University's Department of African-American Studies helped give the field legitimacy. He has also successfully championed the inclusion of black writers in the American literary cannon, serving as co-editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996). He is also co-editor of Africana 2000, a massive CD-ROM encyclopedia of the African diaspora, as well as its print version, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999).

Gates has distinguished himself as an effective fundraiser, a prolific writer and editor of books and articles, a spokesperson for cultural diversity, reparations, and affirmative action, and as the host of a six-part BBC/PBS television series, Wonders of the African World.

Gates was the 2002 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004 he co-edited African American Lives.

See also Black Studies; English, African-American; Intellectual Life; Literary Criticism, U.S.

Bibliography

Bigelow, Barbara Carlisle, ed., Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 3. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1993.

Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft. "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. Wants W. E. B. DuBois, Wole Soyinka and Phyllis Wheatley on the Nation's Reading Lists." Time 137, no. 16 (April 1991): 16–17.

Smothers, Bonnie. "The Booklist Interview: Henry Louis Gates Jr." Booklist 93, no. 12 (February 15, 1997): 972–973.

richard newman (2001)
Updated by publisher 2005