Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (b. 1950), scholar, critic, essayist, editor, professor, and chair of Afro-American studies at Harvard University. Arguably the most influential black literary scholar of the 1980s, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who earned his PhD at Cambridge University, has been the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and the American Book Award. In his early textual scholarship, Gates achieved prominence by establishing Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) as the first novel published in the United States by an African American. At the same time, Gates, along with such other scholars as Robert Stepto and Dexter Fisher, who together coedited Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1979), were laying the groundwork for a critical approach to African American literature that sought to focus on its literariness, breaking with, as Gates argued, the social realist preoccupation of critics of previous generations.

Central to Gates's establishment of this intended break was, first, an exploration of what the advent of structuralist and poststructuralist critical theory portended for the study of African American literature, and second, an attention to the way that the formal and rhetorical features of black-authored texts could enable the positing of a distinctly black literary tradition. As an editor Gates addressed the first half of his agenda, bringing together a host of scholars in Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984) and ““Race”,” Writing, and Difference (1986), which was first published as a special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry. These essays sought to demonstrate the applicability of literary theory to a responsible reading of black-authored texts and to reconcile a commitment to a black racial difference with an awareness that race exists as a social construction rather than a biological fact. In his own work of the period, Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the ““Racial”” Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), Gates continued his effort to define the distinctly black rhetorical tropes and figures in literary texts. The Signifying Monkey argued for continuities between African—specifically Yoruban—vernacular and folk traditions, and African American vernacular speech. These continuities, Gates claimed, were to be found in the practice of ““signifyin(g)”” (self-reflexive linguistic play in everyday language) and in folk tales about the signifying monkey.

Gates's work has not been without its critics. Some readers have discerned a strain of racial essentialism in his putatively social constructionist stance. Others have charged his work with being apolitical or neocon-servative in orientation. Even so, Gates's larger editorial projects may be his most enduring contribution to African American literary study. He helped focus attention on the work of Nobel Prize—winner Wole Soyinka, and through serving as general editor for the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, has made readily available crucial texts for scholars and general readers in the field. He is also general editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.

Gates's publications have extended beyond his specialty in literary criticism. His 1994 memoir, Colored People, chronicles fondly and humorously what it was like growing up in segregation-era Mineral County, West Virginia. His writings for the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times have ranged widely over cultural and political issues. In 1997, with his co-editor, Nellie McKay, and a team of nine editors, Gates saw into print the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, a text that received unprecedented attention in the popular media before becoming a widely used college and university textbook. In 1999, Gates, in collaboration with Kwame Anthony Appiah and funded by the Microsoft Corporation, brought out the Encarta Africana, the first encyclopedia of Africana to appear on CD-ROM.See also Literary History, article on Late Twentieth Century.

Bibliography

• Theodore O. Mason, Jr., “Between the Populist and the Scientist: Ideology and Power in Recent Afro-American Literary Criticism; or, ‘The Dozens’ as Scholarship,” Callaloo II (Summer 1988): 606–615.
• Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Conservation of ‘Race,”’ Black American Literary Forum 23 (1989): 37–60.
• Diana Fuss, “‘Race’ Under Erasure? Poststructuralist Afro-American Literary Theory,” in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, 1989, pp. 73–96

Kenneth W. Warren

scholar; college teacher; critic; writer; chairperson

Personal Information

Born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, WV; son of Henry Louis and Pauline Augusta Gates; married Sharon Lynn Adams, 1979; children: Maude, Elizabeth
Education: Yale University, BA, 1973; Clare College, Cambridge University (England), MA, 1974, PhD, 1979.
Politics: Democrat.
Religion: Episcopalian.
Memberships:
(selected) Union of Writers of the African Peoples; Afro-American Academy; Trans Africa Forum Scholars Council; Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History (life); Caribbean Studies Association; College Language Association (life); Modern Language Association; Zora Neale Hurston Society; ACLU National Advisory Council; National Coalition against Censorship; Phi Beta Kappa.

Career

Time, London Bureau, staff correspondent, 1973-75; American Cyanamid Co., public relations representative, 1975; Yale, lecturer, 1976-79, assistant professor of English, 1979-84, director of dept of undergraduate Afro-American studies, 1979-85, associate prof of English, 1984-85; Cornell Univ, prof of English and African Studies, 1985-90, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Literature, 1988-90; Duke, John Spenser Bassett Professor of English, 1990-91; Harvard, W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, 1991-, dept chair, African-American Studies, 1991-. Created television series The Image of the Black in the Western Imagination, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1982. Consultant to Menil Foundation.

Life's Work

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Skip," is one of the most powerful academic voices in America. In 1997 Gates was voted one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans." An article in Time asserted, "Combine the braininess of the legendary black scholar W.E.B. DuBois and the chutzpah of P.T. Barnum, and the result is Henry Louis Gates, Jr." He is most recognized for his extensive research of African American history and literature, and for developing and expanding the African American Studies program at Harvard University. The first black to have received a Ph.D. from Cambridge, Gates is the author of many books, articles, essays, and reviews, and has received numerous awards and honorary degrees. Gates, who has displayed an endless dedication to bringing African-American culture to the public, has co-authored, co-edited, and produced some of the most comprehensive African-American reference materials in the country. Booklist declared that Gates "is doing for African Americans in the U.S. what Tocqueville did for Europeans."

Gates was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, a city surrounded by the Allegheny Mountains. Gates's father, Henry Louis, Sr. worked at the local paper mill during the day, and worked at the telephone company as a janitor at night. His mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses in addition to caring for her two children. Gates described his father as being an extraordinary storyteller and credited his mother with instilling a great deal of self-confidence in both he and his brother. She was fascinated by the teachings of Malcolm X but also wanted her children to be able to work and live within an integrated society. Pauline was involved with her children's education and was the first black PTA member in their community. As Louis entered his teenage years his mother began a long struggle with depression and was hospitalized. Profoundly affected, the young Gates made a deal with God: If his mother came home from the hospital, he would devote his life to Christ. His mother did come home and Gates became heavily involved with his church, but as the 1960s unfolded with race riots, assassinations, and anti-war movements, he turned his focus outward.

Found His Path

In 1964, when Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was 14 years old, he suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint of the hip while playing touch football in his hometown. He didn't realize the severity of the injury until a few weeks later when the joint sheared apart while he was walking. The white doctor who examined Gates shortly afterward questioned the boy about his injury as well as his career plans. When the young Gates replied that he wanted to be a doctor and then correctly answered many questions about science, the doctor made his diagnosis. He told Gates to stand and walk, and the young boy fell to the floor in intense pain. The doctor then turned to Gates's mother and explained that her son's problem was psychosomatic--a black boy from Appalachia who wanted to be a doctor in the mid-1960s was an overachiever. Years later Gates wrote in an article for the New York Times that "'overachiever' designated a sort of pathology: the overstraining of your natural capacity." As a result of the misdiagnosis, Gates's right leg is more than two inches shorter than his left.

Since that time Gates has been trying to overcome not only his personal physical handicap but his race's general metaphysical handicap as well. "The most subtle and pernicious form of racism against blacks [is] doubt about our intellectual capacities," he explained to Maurice Berger in Art in America. Gates has easily dispelled such doubts, having earned some of the highest scholastic achievements and placing himself in a position to argue logically and eloquently for a multicultural approach to education.

To appreciate the contributions of African-Americans to the cultural history of America, for example, Gates believed one must understand the indigenous culture out of which those achievements arose. Since Gates felt that "culture is always a conversation among different voices," as he wrote in the New York Times, it is the history of the black voice in black literature, with its "repetition and revision of shared themes, topoi and tropes, the call and response of voices, their music and cacophony," that must be studied.

After having graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a degree in history, Gates won fellowships to study at the Clare College of Cambridge University in England. It was there that he met the Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who became a mentor for Gates. Instructing him in the mythology and writings of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, Soyinka convinced Gates to study literature, specifically African-American literature and its lineage from and similarities to the literary traditions of Africa and the Caribbean.

Rediscovered First African-American Novel

Almost immediately after his completion of a doctorate degree in English language and literature in 1979, Gates won acclaim for his critical essays on black literature. In 1981 the MacArthur Foundation recognized him as one of 21 gifted individuals, giving him a five-year grant totaling $150,000. It was his rediscovery and republication in 1983 of Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, the first novel published in the United States by a black person, however, that placed Gates at the forefront of black scholars. The novel was originally published in 1859 but was immediately ignored, only to later be labeled the work of a white man. Gates's almost archeological approach in verifying the original author helped extend the African-American literary tradition by more than 30 years.

Gates's Black Periodical Literature Project, begun in 1980, also benefited from the acclaim of Our Nig's republication. More money was consequently infused into the project, which exhumed nineteenth-century black literary works buried in periodicals. Spurred on by the belief of black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers that it is "the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood--the power of 'yes' to the 'female' within," as Gates quoted Spillers in the New York Times Book Review, he focused on the literary accomplishments of black women from that period, culminating in his editing the thirty-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, published in 1988. Eric J. Sundquist, critiquing the publication for the New York Times Book Review, believed it would alter the landscape of American cultural thought, demonstrating "that black men and black women have never hesitated to grasp the pen and write their own powerful story of freedom."

But it has been Gates's critical approach, the definition of a black literary theory, that has attracted the most attention, including critics' skepticism. In Black Literature and Literary Theory, published in 1984 and edited by Gates, he attacked the notion of the traditional, Eurocentric literary canon by proposing the establishment of a black literary canon. But Terry Eagleton, writing in the New York Times Book Review, maintained that the essays included in the book discourage such a notion; while enriching our perception of black literary works, he found they also "implicitly question the authoritarianism of a literary 'canon.'"

Gates, however, has remained resolute in his belief. "Long after white American literature has been anthologized and canonized, and recanonized," he stated in the New York Times Book Review, "our efforts to define a black American canon are often decried as racist, separatist, nationalist, or 'essentialist.'" Gates further insists that the reason black works are not included is because the traditional canon is based on Western or European culture. He argues that most systems used to judge art are culturally specific. Black work cannot be appreciated or criticized on the basis of a Western cultural aesthetic. He told Art in America's Berger there must be "systems that account for the full complexity of American art, music, and literature--in all there multicolored strains.... To say that black art is a thing apart, separate from the whole, is a racist fiction. We have to conceive a new aesthetic status for American art in all of its facets."

Providing Literary History

In addition to editing The Norton Anthology of African American Literature in 1998, Gates, an endless researcher, co-edited The Civitas Anthonology of African American Slave Narratives, a collection of ten stories, in 1999. Early in 2001, Gates, somewhat of a literary sleuth, purchased a manuscript at an auction from the private collection of the librarian at Howard University, Dorothy Porter Wesley. The handwritten manuscript, whose title page read,The Bondswoman's Narrative, by Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped From North Carolina, fell into the right hands. At the time he purchased the manuscript, Gates, who was recovering from a series of hip surgeries and was confined to his home, had nothing but time to pour into this project. After many months of research to further authenticate the manuscript, Gates published the book. Gates declared to Book, that the book might be "the first novel written by a black woman and definitely the first novel written by a woman who had been a slave."

Defined Black Literary Critical Approach

Gates tried to provide the basis on which to judge black literary works, defining their own cultural aesthetic, in his seminal work The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, a 1989 American Book Award winner. Gates proposed the theory that black writers, as Andrew Delbanco explained in the New Republic, "throw off the oppressive weight of their predecessors by first incorporating, then transforming, them." Gates labels this parodic technique "Signifyin(g)"--indicating the omission of the final "g" as is often done in the black vernacular. And it is in the black vernacular tradition that Gates locates the true black literary criticism.

Africans transported to America before the outlaw of slavery refused to learn the white slave owners' language, thereby preventing assimilation into the fabricated caste system. They instead created their own version of that language to safeguard themselves. "Signifying is verbal play--serious play that serves as instruction, entertainment, mental exercise, preparation for interacting with friend or foe in the social arena," John Wideman pointed out in the New York Times Book Review. "In black vernacular, Signifying is a sign that words cannot be trusted, that even the most literal utterance allows room for interpretation, that language is both carnival and minefield."

Parody and allusion, prevalent in African myths and African-American folktales, are intimate forms of this black vernacular verbal play, and the interpretive act is endless. "Gates means that repetition, revision, and usurpation are as integral to black street talk as they are to Western poetry," Delbanco wrote. Therefore, to understand black literary works, Gates argues, one must understand the purposes behind the black vernacular tradition of endlessly playing against itself--varying, revising, extending. An example of signifying that Gates cites is a line from a monologue by H. Rap Brown: "Ain't nothing bad 'bout you but your breath." Delbanco noted that the word "bad" in this instance "is simultaneously an endorsement and a reversal of the conventional meaning of the word in white usage. Both meanings, white and black, are present. The word is thereby enriched."

Defended 2 Live Crew

Gates called on this tradition of language as a game in helping to defend the rap group 2 Live Crew against obscenity charges in Florida in 1990. He wrote in the New York Times that 2 Live Crew's "exuberant use of hyperbole (phantasmagoric sexual organs, for example) undermines--for anyone fluent in black cultural codes--a too literal-minded hearing of the lyrics. This is the street tradition called 'signifying' or 'playing the dozens,' which has generally been risque." Gates further tied the group's approach to the black mythic tradition, explaining to a reporter from Jet that in 2 Live Crew's music "what you hear is great humor, great joy, and great boisterousness. It's a joke. It's a parody and parody is one of the most venerated forms of art."

It is the lack of understanding in American society of the function and value of this black tradition, Gates believes, that has fostered intellectual racism--a tone deafness to the black cultural voice. Gates does not call for the precedence of black culture over its Western counterpart. "I wouldn't want to get rid of anything in [the Western] tradition," he told Breena Clarke and Susan Tifft of Time. "I think the Western tradition has been a marvelous, wonderful tradition. But it's not the only tradition full of great ideas." Gates argues instead for an understanding and appreciation of the logical interconnection of cultural works, of their integrated diversity: "Every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black," he commented in the New York Times Book Review. "There can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well."

Attacked Black Representation and Separatism

The absence of black works in the artistic cultural milieu, according to Gates, is coupled with an improper depiction in the popular cultural environment. Gates is disturbed not only by the representation of blacks on television--"a very poor index to our social advancement or political progress," he wrote in the New York Times--but also by blacks' attitude toward education and athletics. "Imbued with a belief that our principal avenue to fame and profit is through sport, and seduced by a win-at-any-cost system that corrupts even elementary school students, far too many black kids treat basketball courts and football fields as if they were classrooms in an alternative school system," Gates wrote in Sports Illustrated. Education is crucial, Gates explained to V. R. Peterson in Essence, to combat damaging racial stereotypes and beliefs: "I find the lack of knowledge about Black people that Black people have distressing. What I think of as intellectual racism--the idea that Blacks are innately inferior--will be countered if each of us is an authentic scholar."

But Gates decries any type of education that focuses on only one culture. He believes that schools set up to teach only an Afrocentric curriculum merely perpetuate racist cultural attitudes. "Bogus theories of 'sun' and 'ice' people, and the individual scapegoating of other ethnic groups, only resurrects the worst of 19th-century racist pseudoscience--which too many of the pharaohs of 'Afrocentrism' have accepted without realizing," Gates explained in Newsweek. He also condemns the belief that only blacks can teach or write about black culture. "I think that's ridiculous," he told Time's Clarke and Tifft. "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate [writer William] Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth."

In Time magazine Robert Hughes once described America as "a place filled with diversity, unsettled histories, images impinging on one another and spawning unexpected shapes. Its polyphony of voices, its constant eddying of claims to identity, is one of the things that makes America America." For this to continue, Gates believes, it is imperative that there is tolerance and understanding across cultural lines: "The challenge facing America will be the shaping of a truly common public culture, one responsive to the long-silenced cultures of color," he declared in the New York Times. "If we relinquish the ideal of America as a plural nation, we've abandoned the very experiment America represents."

Mainstreamed Africana

In 1991, Gates became the chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University. At the time the department was an academic wasteland: One professor, who was white, and a handful of students. In a matter of a few years, Gates managed to bring some of the most prominent black intellectuals in the country to his department including, Cornel West, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and William Julius Wilson. Gates told Richard Newman, writing for Publisher's Weekly, "This is all about redefining the very meaning of America. Anglo-American regional culture is simply not universal. We're helping to create a new cultural consciousness, one that's pluralistic and diverse."

Education and familiarity provide the means to achieve a more tolerant perspective. With this in mind, Gates has used cutting-edge technology and some of the most popular media and corporate resources available to educate the public. For example, when the McDonald's corporation dedicated the year 2000 to promote African-American heritage, Gates wrote a two volume booklet set, Little Known Black History Facts, that was offered for sale with a meal purchase. In the early 1970s, Gates, along with some colleagues, made a pact to fulfil a dream of the late W.E.B. DuBois: to publish the black equivalent to the Encyclopedia Britannica. After almost 25 years, and after much trial and tribulation, the project was finished. Microsoft produced a CD-ROM version of the encyclopedia, Encarta Africana and Perseus published the print version, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience.

In 1999 Gates launched Africana.com, a web site created to provide corrections and revisions to Encarta Africana but the site became so popular, that Gates expanded the site. The following year, Africana.com was purchased by AOL Time Warner. He also joined the advisory board of Digital Learning Interactive, an interactive online learning resource, and developed a comprehensive course on the Harlem Renaissance. Another impressive educational projects was his six-part mini series for PBS, The Wonders of the African World. Gates assembled a team of dedicated intellectuals who traveled through 12 African countries over a period of one year, gathering and examining evidence of past African cultures. Gates explained to Jet, "As a black American, I know what it's like to have your history stolen from you. I wanted to bring this lost African world into the consciousness of the larger public, Black and White." Time quoted Gerald Early, the director of African And Afro-American studies at Washington University in St, Louis, "Skip Gates has legitimized black studies in the mainstream."

Awards

Selected: Carnegie Foundation fellowship for Africa, 1970-71; Phelps fellowship, Yale Univ, 1970-71; Mellon fellowships, Cambridge University, 1973-75, and National Humanities Center, 1989-90; grants from Ford Foundation, 1976-77 and 1984-85, and National Endowment for the Humanities, 1980-86; A. Whitney Griswold fellowship, 1980; Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, 1981 and 1990; MacArthur Prize fellowship, MacArthur Foundation, 1981-86; Yale Afro-American teaching prize, 1983; award from Whitney Humanities Center, 1983-85; Award for creative scholarship, Zora Neale Hurston Soc, 1986; Woodrow Wilson National Fellow, 1988-89 and 1989-90; Amer Book Award and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Race Relations, both for The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, 1989; Best New Journal the Year award (in the humanities and the social sciences), Assn of Publishers, 1992; elected to the Amer Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993; Heartland Prize for Nonfiction for People: A Memoir, 1994; Humanities Award, West Virginia Humanities Council, 1995; Distinguished Editorial Achievement, Critical Inquiry, 1996; W.D. Weatherford Award; recipient of numerous honorary degrees from Dartmouth Coll, 1989; Univ of West Virginia, 1990; Univ of New Hampshire, 1991; Bryant Coll, 1992; George Washington Univ, 1993; Emory Univ, 1995.

Works

Selected writings

• Author
• (With James Gibbs and Ketu H. Katrak) Wole Soyinka: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, Greenwood Press, 1986.
• Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, Oxford University Press, 1987.
• The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Editor
• Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Charles T. Davis's Essays on Black Literature and Culture, 1942-1981, Garland Publishing, 1982.
• Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, Random House, 1983.
• Black Literature and Literary Theory, Methuen, 1984.
• (With Charles T. Davis) The Slave's Narrative: Texts and Contexts, Oxford University Press, 1985.
• "Race," Writing, and Difference, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• The Classic Slave Narratives, New American Library, 1987.
• The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, thirty volumes, Oxford University Press, 1988.
• In the House of Osubgo: Critical Essays on Wole Soyinka, Oxford University Press, 1989.
• (With others) The Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature, Norton, 1990, 1999.
• Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Literary Critical Anthology, New American Library, 1990.
• Three Classic African-American Novels, Random, 1990.
• (With George H. Bass) Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, HarperCollins, 1991.
• Bearing Witness: Selections from 150 Years of African-American Autobiography, Pantheon, 1991.
• (With Kwame Anthony Appiah) Dictionary of Global Culture, Knopf, 1997.
• (With William L. Andrews) The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives, Counterpoint Civitas, 1999.
• (With Carl Pederson) Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, Oxford, 1999.
• (With others) Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, Perseus, 1999.
• Contributor
• Herbert Sacks, editor, The Book of Hurdles, Atheneum, 1978.
• Robert Stepto and Dexter Fisher, editors, Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, Modern Language Association of America, 1979.
• William H. Robinson, editor, Critical Essays on Phyllis Wheatley, G. K. Hall, 1982.
• Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940, Bedford Arts, 1991.
• Also contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals and journals, including Antioch Review, Black American Literature Forum, Black World, Critical Inquiry, The New Yorker, New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Southern Review, and Yale Review. Member of board of editors of American Quarterly, Black American Literature Forum, Cultural Critique, Proteus, and Studies in American Fiction; member of board of directors of Critical Inquiry and Diacritics; advisory editor to Contributions to African and Afro-American Studies and Studies on Black Life and Culture.

Further Reading

Periodicals

• America, May 31, 1997.
• Art in America, September 1990.
• Black Issues in Higher Education, November 12, 1998; February 4, 1999; November 25, 1999; March 1, 2001; February 28, 2002.
• Book, November-December, 2002.
• Booklist, February 15, 1997; May 1, 1997; February 15, 1999; February 15, 2001.
• Business Wire, May 1, 2001.
• The Economist, August 7, 1999; January 15, 2000.
• Essence, November 1990.
• Critical Inquiry, Summer, 1999.
• Jet, November 5, 1990; October 25, 1999; August 27, 2000; September 25, 2000; January 21, 2002.
• Library Journal, November 1, 1990; February 1, 1991; July 1991; July, 2002.
• National Review, May 27, 1991; March 10, 1997.
• National Post, June 29, 2002.
• Nation's Restaurant News, September 4, 2000.
• New Republic, January 9, 1989; January 16, 1989.
• Newsweek, September 23, 1991; February 19, 1997; November 1, 1999.
• New York Times, November 12, 1989; June 19, 1990; February 10, 1991; May 4, 1991; June 23, 1991.
• New York Times Book Review, December 9, 1984; July 7, 1985; July 3, 1988; August 14, 1988; February 26, 1989; March 25, 1990.
• New York Times Magazine, April 1, 1990; December 9, 1990.
• Publishers Weekly, January 18, 1991; June 20, 1994; September 27, 1999.
• Sports Illustrated, August 19, 1991.
• Time, April 22, 1991; February 3, 1992; February 26, 1999; April 21, 1997.

— Rob Nagel and Christine Miner Minderovic

For more information on Henry Louis Jr. Gates, visit Britannica.com.

1950–, American scholar and critic, b. Keyser, W.Va., grad. Yale Univ. (B.A. 1973), Cambridge Univ. (Ph.D. 1979), where he studied with Wole Soyinka. Gates is an expert on African-American literature and culture. His rediscovery and reinterpretation of historic black literature began in 1981 with his finding, authenticating, and publishing of the first known novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859). Since then Gates has been instrumental in bringing other previously lost works to light. His many books of criticism include Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), in which he develops the notion of “signifyin(g),” a linguistic tradition running throughout black culture that describes things or people by the use of humor, paradox, indirection, boast, and insult. His nonacademic works include Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997); he is also coeditor of The Dictionary of Global Culture (1997) and The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin (2006). In 1999 he wrote and hosted a public television series on Africa and wrote a companion text, Wonders of the African World. Gates has taught at several universities, including Yale (1979–85), Cornell (1985–90), and Harvard (1991–).

Bibliography

See his memoir, Colored People: Letters to My Daughters (1993).

(b. 1950)

1988	The Signifying Monkey: Toward a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Gates, professor of English and African American studies at Cornell, argues that more critical attention should be paid to black writers' use of language rather than just their evocation of the black experience. Gates demonstrates his point by analyzing the linguistic patterns of African American texts, finding a form of signification--wordplay--that is unique in American writing, relying on the black vernacular as well as on traditional figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, understatement, and exaggeration.
1990	Reading Black, Reading Feminist. Gates edits this anthology of essays on African American women writers including Phillis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Octavia Butler, and Rita Dove.
1992	Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. This essay collection on literary and social topics focuses on questions of cultural pluralism, canon formation, and the legitimacy of African American studies.
1994	Colored People: A Memoir. Gates provides an account of his childhood and upbringing in a West Virginia mill town during the 1950s and 1960s. It is an authentic portrait of black life before integration and black liberation.
1997	Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man. Based on interviews with figures such as James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, and Colin Powell, Gates collects various perspectives on the lot of the black man in American society. The book is praised by reviewer Michael A. Lutes as "a riveting commentary on race in America."

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