10 Feb 2021

Walter Mosley

Black Authors post, Day 10.

Black Authors post, Day 10.

Today’s author is fiction and mystery author Walter Mosley.

Walter Ellis Mosley was born in Los Angeles, California in 1952. His mother was descended from Polish Jewish people, and his father was an African American man from Louisiana. His parents tried to marry in 1951, but no one would give them a marriage license, despite interracial marriage being legal in California.

Mosley was an only child. His mother encouraged him to read as much as she could, and he describes his father as “a deep thinker and storyteller, a ‘black Socrates’”.

After graduating from high school, Mosley went to Goddard College, and then earned a political science degree at Johnson State College. After college, he started work programming computers. In 1987, he married dancer and choreographer Joy Kellman. They later separated and divorced in 2001.

After being inspired by Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem. One of his teachers, Edna O’Brien, encouraged his writing, saying: “You’re Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches therein.” After having several pieces rejected from large publishing houses, Mosley wrote a novel about his soon-to-be famous character, Easy Rawlins. He showed the novel to Fredrich Tuten, one of his instructors in the City College program. Tuten was so impressed, he showed his own agent. This book, The Devil in the Blue Dress, was published in 1990.

Mosley went on to continue to write more books about Easy Rawlins, as well as introducing other heroes like Leonid McGill and Fearless Jones. He has written several science fiction books, non-fiction books, plays, erotica, and a graphic novel. His work has been published in 25 different languages, and some of his work has been adapted into movies and television shows. He has won several awards, including the O Henry Award, the Carl Brandon Society’s Parallax Award, the NAACP Image Award, the Edgar Award, and in 2020 was named the recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Mosley currently resides in New York City. His latest book, Blood Grove, was just released last week.

Some of my favorite works by Walter Mosley:

A note: These Amazon links point to Amazon Smile, Amazon’s affiliate charity program. If you have not set up Amazon Smile, I encourage you to point it to an organization like Minnesota Freedom Fund, which helps people in need pay for bail and immigration bonds, and works to end discriminatory jailing.

Some links:

Image: Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0