Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cyclopedia of World Authors)
Considered one of the most provocative and influential scholars in the United States, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was born in a small West Virginia town to Henry Louis and Pauline Augusta Gates. As a child, Gates read voraciously, carefully recording his ideas in a commonplace book. When he was fifteen years old, an Episcopalian priest gave him a copy of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955), which catalyzed his interest in African American literature. Gates has recalled that reading this book “fueled a love of literature like nothing [he] had ever experienced before,”...
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