“If Frederick Douglass could recuperate and champion Thomas Jefferson, during the Civil War of all times, is it possible for us to do the same for a modest young poet named Phillis Wheatley?” Gates asked. “What’s required is only that we recognize that there are no ‘white minds’ or ‘black minds’: there are only minds, and yes, they are, as that slogan has it, a terrible thing to waste.... The challenge isn’t to read white, or read black; it is to read. If Phillis Wheatley stood for anything, it was the creed that culture was, could be, the equal possession of all humanity.”

Gates has played a key role in shaping the discipline of African American studies and emphasizing its importance in the academic world.“ We [Afro-American scholars] are transforming the traditional disciplines as well,” he said. “The notion of what constitutes the canon of American literature is fundamentally different now because of the growth of Afro-American studies or the growth of women’s studies.”

Born and raised in West Virginia, Gates was graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in history. He took a year off to work at a mission hospital in Tanzania, and when he returned wrote a column for the Yale Daily News about his experiences. Gates went on to write for Time magazine after graduation and, supported by a Mellon Fellowship, earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge.

At the age of thirty, he received one of the first MacArthur Foundation Fellowships. He credits “a rainbow coalition of mentors” for encouraging his scholarship.“It has never occurred to me that to be a mentor one must look like one’s subject or share the same religion,” says Gates.“One must just share a similar sensibility and, fortunately, that’s not defined by ethnicity or gender or sexual preference or religion or any of those things.”

In 1982, Gates rediscovered the 1859 book Old Nig by Harriet E.Wilson, the first published American novel written by a black person. Twenty years later, he unearthed The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, thought to be an even older work, which he published in 2002. “I’ve always thought of myself as both a literary historian and a literary critic, someone who loves archives and someone who is dedicated to resurrecting texts that have dropped out of sight,” he says.

In addition to his autobiography, Colored People: A Memoir, Gates has written Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars,The Future of the Race (with Cornel West), and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, which won the 1989 American Book Award. His editing projects include The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, The Dictionary of Global Culture, and the CD-ROM Encarta Africana.

Gates has taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke Universities. He is the
W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and the chair of the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard. He also directs the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. Gates lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Sharon; they have two daughters, Maggie and Liza.