Walter Ellis Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is an American novelist, most widely recognized for hiscrime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring thehardboiled detectiveEasy Rawlins, a blackprivate investigator living in theWatts neighborhood ofLos Angeles, California. In 2020, Mosley received theNational Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.[1]
Mosley was born inLos Angeles, California. His mother, Ella (née Slatkin), was Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk. Her ancestors had immigrated from Russia.[2] His father, Leroy Mosley (1924–1993), was an African American fromLouisiana who was a supervisingcustodian at aLos Angeles public school. He had worked as a clerk in thesegregated US army during the Second World War. His parents tried to marry in 1951, and while the union was legal in California, where they were living, no one would give them amarriage license.[3][4][5]
Mosley was an only child, and he ascribes his writing imagination to "an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies.” For $9.50 a week, he attended the VictoryBaptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes inblack history. When he was 12, his parents moved fromSouth Central to the more comfortable, working-classwest LA.[6] He graduated fromAlexander Hamilton High School, in 1970.[7] Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a "black Socrates.” His mother encouraged him to read European classics, fromDickens andZola toCamus. He also lovesLangston Hughes andGabriel 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 highly politicized and outspoken aboutracial inequalities in the US, which are a context for much of his fiction.
Mosley went through a "long-haired hippie" phase, drifting aroundSanta Cruz and Europe. He dropped out ofGoddard College, aliberal arts college inPlainfield, Vermont, and then earned a political science degree atJohnson State College. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory, he started workprogramming computers. He moved to New York in 1981, and met the dancer andchoreographer Joy Kellman, whom he married in 1987. Kellman, like Mosley's mother, was Jewish.[8] They separated ten years later, and were divorced in 2001. While working forMobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course atCity College inHarlem, after being inspired byAlice Walker's bookThe Color Purple.[9] One of his tutors there, Irish writerEdna O'Brien, became a mentor and encouraged him, saying, "You're Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches therein."[10][11]
Mosley started writing at 34 and claims to have written every day, since, penning more than forty books and often publishing two books a year. He has written in a variety offiction categories, includingmystery andafrofuturist science fiction, as well as nonfiction politics. His work has been translated into 21 languages. His direct inspirations include the detective fiction ofDashiell Hammett,Graham Greene andRaymond Chandler. Mosley's fame increased in 1992 when presidential candidateBill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favorite authors.[6] Mosley made publishing history, in 1997, by forgoing an advance to give the manuscript ofGone Fishin' to a small, independent publisher,Black Classic Press inBaltimore, run by formerBlack PantherPaul Coates.
Former literature professor Harold Heft argued for Mosley's inclusion in the literary canon of Jewish-American writers. InMoment magazine,Johanna Neuman writes that black literary circles questioned whether Mosley should be considered a "black author". Mosley has said that he prefers to be called anovelist. He explains his desire to write about "black male heroes", saying "hardly anybody in America has written about black male heroes. There are black male protagonists and black male supporting characters, but nobody else writes about black male heroes."[9]
In 2019, after working in the writers room for the television seriesSnowfall, Mosley was hired, byAlex Kurtzman, for a similar role on the third season ofStar Trek: Discovery. After working on the series for three weeks, Mosley was notified byCBS 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, quitting without informing Kurtzman, and he explained his decision in anop-ed forThe New York Times, in September 2019. He did not identifyDiscovery as the series he was working on in the op-ed, but this was confirmed, in reports on the op-ed, shortly after its release.[15]
Snowfall (TV), consulting producer (2018-2019), executive producer (2021-2023), episode writer: "Prometheus Rising" (2018), "Cash and Carry" (2019), "Blackout" (2019), "Betrayal" (2021), "All the Way Down" (2021), "Celebration" (2022), "Charnel House" (2023), and "Door of No Return" (2023)
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2022) (TV), creator, executive producer, based on his novel of the same name, episode writer: "Reggie", "Robyn", "Sensia", "Coydog", "Nina", and "Ptolemy"
^"Mystery Writer Remembers His Days at Hamilton High".Los Angeles Times. June 18, 1997. RetrievedOctober 1, 2013.Mystery writer Walter Mosley, whose 1990 novel, 'Devil in a Blue Dress,' was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington, is a 1970 graduate of Hamilton High School.
Berger, Roger A., "'The Black Dick': Race, Sexuality, and Discourse in the L.A. Novels of Walter Mosley", inAfrican American Review 31 (Summer 1997): 281–94.
Berrettini, Mark, "Private Knowledge, Public Space: Investigation and Navigation in Devil in a Blue Dress", inCinema Journal 39 (Fall 1999): 74–89.
Brady, Owen E., ed.,Conversations with Walter Mosley (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011).
Brady, Owen E., and 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 Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays from James M. Cain to Walter Mosley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1995).
Freiburger, William, "James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, and the Politics of the Los Angeles Crime Novel", inClues: A Journal of Detection 17 (Fall–Winter 1996): 87–104.
Gruesser, John C., "An Un-Easy Relationship: Walter Mosley's Signifyin(g) Detective and the Black Community," inConfluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 58–72.
Larson, Jennifer E.,Understanding Walter Mosley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016).
Lennard, John,Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007).
Wesley, Marilyn C., "Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress", inAfrican American Review 35 (Spring 2001): 103–16.
Wilson, Charles E., Jr.,Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT, & London:Greenwood Press, 2003)
