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Keely A. Byars-Nichols
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1950– )
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., was born in 1950
in Keyser, West Virginia, to working-class parents.
His mother was a domestic worker, and his father
was a loader at the mill and a janitor for the tele-
phone company. Gates had a close relationship
with his mother, caring deeply for her, especially
as she confronted severe clinical depression. After
high school, Gates attended Yale, where he con-
tinued to develop his interest in Africa. In his ju-
nior year, Gates traveled in Africa and worked in a
Tanzanian hospital. After graduating summa cum
laude in English language and literature, Gates
went on to study at Clare College, Cambridge, in
England. He worked as a staff correspondent for
Time magazine until he returned to the United
States in 1975. He earned a doctorate from Cam-
bridge in 1979. Gates went on to teach at Yale but
left after four years and became a full professor
in Cornell’s English and Africana studies depart-
ments. Then, in 1990, Gates moved to Duke.
While there, Gates’s testimony in the 2 Live Crew
obscenity trial made him a target for conserva-
tive criticism. In 1991, Gates moved to Harvard
to become the head of the Afro-American studies
department. As a result of Gates’s leadership Har-
vard’s Afro-American studies department ranks
as one of the best in the nation.
Gates has established a distinguished and ex-
tensive writing career. His work includes Figures in
Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (1987), The
SIGNIFYING MONKEY: A THEORY OF AFRO-AMERICAN
LITERARY CRITICISM (1988), Loose Canons: Notes on
the Culture Wars (1992), A Memoir (1994), Colored
People: The Future of the Race (1996, written with
CORNEL WEST), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black
Man (1997), Wonders of the African World (1999),
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and Afri-
can American Experience (1999), and The African
American Century: How Black Americans Have
Shaped Our Century (2000). In addition to his own
writing, Gates has edited a substantial number of
books, including the 10-year project The Norton
Anthology of African American Literature (1996)
and OUR NIG; or Sketches from the Life of a Free
Black, In a Two Story White House, North. Show-
ing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (1983),
which he identified and brought to critical atten-
tion as the first African-American novel written
and published in America.
Gates has also edited several magazines, from
Transition magazine and the Dictionary of Cultural
and Critical Theory to the Journal of Urban and
Cultural Studies. A prolific essayist, Gates writes
pieces ranging from introductions for literary edi-
tions of novels to articles for The New York Times,
The New Yorker, and ESSENCE magazine. Gates
traveled through 12 African countries in one year,
and the trip was filmed as a six-part documentary
for PBS called Wonders of the African World with
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In 2002 Gates edited and
published yet another find, Hannah Crafts’s The
Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Craft, a Fugi-
tive Slave, Recently Escaped from North Carolina,
a 300-page holograph manuscript that had never
been published before.
Easily one of the foremost scholars in African-
American studies, Gates is a celebrated, innova-
tive, and respected thinker. One of Gates’s primary
scholarly contributions is the theory he set out in
Figures in Black. Here Gates argues for discussing
black texts on their “artistic merits” rather than
their “extraliterary purposes” (Spikes, 45) or “the
black experience” (43). Gates shifted the focus
for critiquing black texts “to form, to style andGates, Henry Louis, Jr. 199