Interview Details

Title & Link

How Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Helped Remake the Literary Canon | The New Yorker

Publish Date

February 19, 2022

Interviewees

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Interviewers

Publisher

Topics

African American literature

Barack Obama's presidency

Black authors and history

Debates on race and social justice

economic inequality

George Floyd movement

History of racism

Recommended fiction and nonfiction works

Reconstruction period

Remaking the literary canon

People Mentioned

Anatole Broyard

Andrew S. Curran

Annette Gordon-Reed

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

Frederick Douglass

Harriet E. Wilson

James Weldon Johnson

John F. Kennedy

John Hope Franklin

John L. Comaroff

Lawrence D. Bobo

Michelle Goldberg

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Patricia Lockwood

William Julius Wilson

Zora Neale Hurston

Works Mentioned

A Voice from the South

Africa’s Great Civilizations

Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience

Angela Davis: An Autobiography

At the Bottom of the River

Black Skin, White Masks

Finding Your Roots

From Slavery to Freedom

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

In My Father’s House

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself

Notes of a Native Son

Playing in the Dark

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson

The Black Church

The Bondwoman’s Narrative

The Color Purple

The Conjure Woman

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

The Signifying Monkey

The Souls of Black Folk

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man

Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eight

Places Mentioned

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Martha's Vineyard

University of Cambridge

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