Walter Mosley

Walter Ellis Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hardboiled detective Easy Rawlins, a private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.^[1]

Mosley was born in Los Angeles, California.^[2] His mother, Ella (née Slatkin), was Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk.^[3] Her ancestors had immigrated from Russia.^[4] His father, Leroy Mosley (1916–1993), was an African American from Louisiana who was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school.^[5][6][7] He had worked as a clerk in the segregated US army during the Second World War.^[8] His parents tried to marry in 1951, and while the union was legal in California, where they were living, no one would give them a marriage license.^[9][10][8]

Mosley was an only child. For $9.50 a week, he attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to West LA.^[8] He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School, in 1970.^[11] Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, and his mother encouraged him to read European classics, including Dickens, Zola and Camus. He also loved Langston Hughes and Gabriel García Márquez. He was largely raised in a non-political family culture, although there were racial conflicts flaring throughout L.A. at the time. He later became more politicized and outspoken about racial inequalities in the US, which provide context for much of his fiction.

Mosley went through a "hippie" phase, traveling around Santa Cruz and Europe. He dropped out of Goddard College, a liberal arts college in Plainfield, Vermont, and then earned a political science degree at Johnson State College. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory, he started work programming computers. He moved to New York in 1981, and met dancer and choreographer Joy Kellman, whom he married in 1987. Kellman was also Jewish.^[7] They separated ten years later, and were divorced in 2001. While working for Mobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem, after being inspired by Alice Walker's book The Color Purple.^[7] One of his tutors there, Irish writer Edna O'Brien, became a mentor and encouraged his writing.^[12][13]

Mosley still resides in New York City.^[8] He identifies as both African-American and Jewish.^[7]

Mosley started writing at 34 and has penned more than forty books, often publishing two books a year. He has written in a variety of fiction categories, including mystery and afrofuturist science fiction, as well as nonfiction politics. His work has been translated into 21 languages. His direct inspirations include the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler. Mosley's fame increased in 1992 when presidential candidate Bill Clinton named Mosley as one of his favorite authors.^[8]

Mosley's first published book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was the basis of a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington, and the following year, a 10-part abridgement of the novel by Margaret Busby, read by Paul Winfield, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4.^[14] The world premiere of Mosley's first play, The Fall of Heaven,^[15] was staged at the Playhouse in the Park, Cincinnati, Ohio, in January 2010. In 1997, Mosley forwent an advance to give the manuscript of Gone Fishin' to a small independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore.

Mosley has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards. He is on the board of the TransAfrica Forum.^[16]

In 2019, after working in the writers' room for the television series Snowfall, Mosley was hired by Alex Kurtzman for a similar role on the third season of Star Trek: Discovery. After working on the series for three weeks, Mosley was notified by CBS of a complaint made against him by another member of the writers room for Mosley's use of the word "nigger", while telling a story about his experience with a police officer who had used the slur. CBS told Mosley this was usually a fireable offence but said no further action would be taken and asked that he not use the word, again, outside of a script. Mosley chose to leave the series and explained his decision in an op-ed for The New York Times in September 2019. He did not identify Discovery as the series he was working on in the op-ed, but this was confirmed in reports shortly after its release.^[17]

El exprofesor de literatura Harold Heft abogó por la inclusión de Mosley en el canon literario de escritores judeoamericanos. ^{[ 18 ]} En la revista Moment , Johanna Neuman escribe que los círculos literarios negros cuestionaron si Mosley debía ser considerado un "autor negro". Mosley ha dicho que prefiere que lo llamen novelista . Explicó su deseo de escribir sobre "héroes masculinos negros", diciendo: "Casi nadie en Estados Unidos ha escrito sobre héroes masculinos negros. Hay protagonistas masculinos negros y personajes secundarios masculinos negros, pero nadie más escribe sobre héroes masculinos negros". ^{[ 7 ]}

• 1996 – Premio Literario del Caucus Negro de la Asociación Estadounidense de Bibliotecas por RL's Dream ^{[ 19 ]}

  

• 1996 – Premio O. Henry por un cuento de Sócrates Fortlow
• 1998 – Premio literario Anisfield-Wolf por Siempre en desventaja numérica, siempre con armas de fuego.
• 2001 – Premio Grammy a las Mejores Notas de Álbum por …And It's Deep Too! de Richard Pryor.
• 2004 – Doctorado honoris causa del City College de Nueva York ^{[ 20 ]}
• 2005 – Premio Risktaker del Instituto Sundance
• 2006 – Premio Parallax de la Sociedad Carl Brandon por 47
• 2007 – Premio NAACP Image Award a la mejor obra literaria de ficción por Blonde Faith
• 2009 – Premio NAACP Image Award a la mejor obra literaria de ficción por The Long Fall.
• 2013 – Ingreso al Salón de la Fama de los Escritores del Estado de Nueva York
• 2014 – Nominación al premio NAACP Image Award a la mejor obra literaria de ficción por Little Green.
• 2014 – Medalla Langston Hughes del City College de Nueva York ^{[ 20 ]}
• 2016 – Premio Gran Maestro de la Asociación de Escritores de Misterio de América.
• 2019 – Premio Edgar a la mejor novela por * Down the River Unto the Sea*
• 2019 – Premio Robert Kirsch a la trayectoria profesional ^{[ 21 ]}
• 2020 – Medalla de la Fundación Nacional del Libro por Contribución Distinguida a las Letras Estadounidenses ^{[ 1 ]}
• 2021 – Premio NAACP Image Award a la obra literaria de ficción más destacada por The Awkward Black Man ^{[ 22 ]}
• 2023 – Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers' Association^[23]

• Berger, Roger A., ​​"'The Black Dick': Raza, sexualidad y discurso en las novelas de Walter Mosley ambientadas en Los Ángeles", en African American Review 31 (verano de 1997): 281–94.
• Berrettini, Mark, "Conocimiento privado, espacio público: investigación y navegación en El diablo con vestido azul", en Cinema Journal 39 (otoño de 1999): 74–89.
• Brady, Owen E., ed., Conversaciones con Walter Mosley (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011).
• Brady, Owen E., y Derek C. Maus, eds., Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley's Fiction (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008).
• Fine, David, ed., Los Ángeles en la ficción: una colección de ensayos de James M. Cain a Walter Mosley (Albuquerque: Universidad de Nuevo México, 1995).
• Freiburger, William, "James Ellroy, Walter Mosley y la política de la novela policíaca de Los Ángeles", en Clues: A Journal of Detection 17 (otoño-invierno de 1996): 87-104.
• Gruesser, John C., "Una relación difícil: El detective significativo de Walter Mosley y la comunidad negra", en Confluencias: poscolonialismo, estudios literarios afroamericanos y el Atlántico negro (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 58–72.
• Larson, Jennifer E., Entendiendo a Walter Mosley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016).
• Lennard, John , Walter Mosley, El diablo con vestido azul (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007).
• Wesley, Marilyn C., "Poder y conocimiento en El diablo con vestido azul de Walter Mosley", en African American Review 35 (Primavera de 2001): 103–16.
• Wilson, Charles E. Jr., Walter Mosley: Un compañero crítico (Westport, CT y Londres: Greenwood Press , 2003)

• Sitio web oficial
• Walter Mosley en IMDb
• Entrevista de Walter Mosley realizada por Powell Books.
• Johanna Neuman (septiembre-octubre de 2010). "El curioso caso de Walter Mosley" . Moment . Archivado del original el 26 de julio de 2011.
• Perfil en The New Yorker . "Reseña de Mosley: Los libros de Walter Mosley: 19 de enero de 2004"
• Entrevista radiofónica con Walter Mosley, emitida en el programa de radio de Lewis Burke Frumkes el 2 de abril de 2011.
• Apariciones en C-SPAN