Gates, Henry Louis, Jr

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Born: 1950 Occupation: educator, literary scholar, writer From: The Biographical Dictionary of African Americans. One of the leading African-American intellectuals of his generation, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has made major contributions to American culture. As a professor at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard Universities, Gates has been a powerful force in furthering the study and appreciation of African-American life and literature. Born in Keyser, West Virginia, on September 16, 1950, Gates grew up in nearby Piedmont, where his father worked in the local paper mill. An outstanding student throughout grade school and high school, Gates was admitted to Yale University in 1969. He had originally intended to become a doctor, and during his undergraduate years he received a fellowship to work in a hospital in East Africa. But by the time Gates received his B.A. degree (summa cum laude) in 1973, he had a different goal in mind. He had realized in the course of his studies that the works of black writers and artists were largely ignored, both by scholars and the public. Following the example of W. E. B. DuBois and other pioneers of African-American scholarship, Gates dedicated himself to correcting this situation. Having received a fellowship for graduate study in history, Gates enrolled in England's prestigious Cambridge University, where he earned an M.A. in 1974 and began to study for a doctorate. While at Cambridge, he came into contact with the Nigerian playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1986), who encouraged Gates to study literature rather than history. In 1979, having written a dissertation on racial attitudes in the literature of the Enlightenment, Gates became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Cambridge. Gates then returned to Yale as assistant professor of English and director of the graduate program in African-American studies. In addition to teaching and writing literary criticism, Gates began combing libraries and archives in search of forgotten or neglected works by African-American writers. Over the next decade, he uncovered more than 70,000 individual pieces—short stories, poems, and reviews—from the 19th and 20th centuries. His greatest discovery was the 1859 novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, written by Harriet E. Wilson. Scholars had previously believed that the book was really the work of a male white author, but Gates established Wilson's identity, and Our Nig took its rightful place as the first African-American novel. Gates's tireless research has resulted in three important collections: The Classic Slave Narratives, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, and the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (coedited with Nellie McKay). In his role as a literary critic, Gates has produced a number of important books. They include Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984); Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (1987); and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). The work on these and other writings was aided in part by funds from the MacArthur Foundation, which chose Gates to receive a coveted "genius award" in 1981. By the mid-1980s, Gates had become an academic superstar. In 1985, he left Yale for a post at Cornell University, where he taught for five years before moving on to Duke University as the John Spencer Basset professor of English. In 1990, Gates accepted a position at Harvard, where he became the W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, director of the W. E. B. DuBois Institute of Afro-American Research, and chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies. In his new post, Gates set out to create the number-one African-American studies department in the nation. In pursuit of this goal, he successfully recruited a number of leading black scholars from other universities, drawing Cornel West from Princeton University and William Julius Wilson from the University of Chicago, among others. Gates's wide-ranging interest in modern culture, combined with his intellectual brilliance and personal charm, have spread his influence far beyond the academic world. Through countless interviews, book reviews, magazine articles, and television appearances, he has informed and excited his fellow Americans about the importance of the African-American experience. In recognition of his work, in 1998, President Clinton awarded Gates the National Humanities Medal.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1994. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man. New York: Random House, 1997. W. E. B. DuBois Institute web site. http://web-dubois.fas.harvard.edu. .