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 hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. They are, perhaps, his most popular works. 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. 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 from Louisiana who was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school. He had worked as a clerk in the segregated 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 a marriage 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 Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to the more comfortable, working-class west LA.[6] He graduated from Alexander 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, from Dickens and Zola to Camus. He also loves 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 highly politicized and outspoken about racial inequalities in the US, which are a context of much of his fiction.
Mosley went through a "long-haired hippie" phase, drifting around Santa Cruz and Europe. He dropped out of Goddard College, a liberal arts college in Plainfield, Vermont, and then, he 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 he met the dancer and choreographer, 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 for Mobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem, after being inspired by Alice Walker's book The Color Purple.[9] One of his tutors, there, Irish writer Edna O'Brien, became a mentor and encouraged him, saying: "You're Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches, therein."[10]
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 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, 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 of Gone Fishin' to a small, independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore, run by former Black PantherPaul Coates.
Former literature professor Harold Heft argued for Mosley's inclusion in the literary canon of Jewish-American writers. In Moment 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 a novelist. 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 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, quitting without informing Kurtzman, and he 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 on the op-ed, shortly after its release.[14]
Mosley at the 2024 National Book Awards, introducing Paul Coates1996 – Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Literary Award for RL's Dream
^"Mystery Writer Remembers His Days at Hamilton High". Los Angeles Times. June 18, 1997. Retrieved October 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", in African American Review 31 (Summer 1997): 281–94.
Berrettini, Mark, "Private Knowledge, Public Space: Investigation and Navigation in Devil in a Blue Dress", in Cinema 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", in Clues: 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," in Confluences: 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", in African American Review 35 (Spring 2001): 103–16.
Wilson, Charles E., Jr., Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT, & London: Greenwood Press, 2003)
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