Gates’ is a resonant voice in African-American scholarship. He is the author of The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, and Colored People: A Memoir, which is based on his childhood in a small community in West Virginia. Chair of the Afro-American studies department and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, he is revered for his engaging critical analysis of race and culture in America and his efforts to recover black writers from obscurity.
