About the Author

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research and holder of the distinguished title of the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University. As well as being the author of several award-winning works of literary criticism, he penned the memoir, Colored People (Knopf, 1994); The Future of the Race (Knopf, 1996), coauthored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (Random House, 1997). Gates has edited several anthologies and is the author of Wonders of the African World (1999), the book companion to the six-hour BBC/PBS television series of the same name. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, and received a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University in 1973. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke Universities. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Chicago Tribune Heartland Award (1994), the Golden Plate Achievement Award (1995), Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999).