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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 hardboiled detective Easy Rawlins, a private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. 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.[2] His mother, Ella (née Slatkin), was Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk.[3] Her ancestors had immigrated from Russia.[4] His father, Leroy Mosley (1916–1993), was an African American from Louisiana who was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school.[5][6][7] He had worked as a clerk in the segregated US army during the Second World War.[8] 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.[9][10][8]
Mosley was an only child. For $9.50 a week, he attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to West LA.[8] He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School, in 1970.[11] Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, and his mother encouraged him to read European classics, including Dickens, Zola and Camus. He also loved 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 politicized and outspoken about racial inequalities in the US, which provide context for much of his fiction.
Mosley still resides in New York City.[8] He identifies as both African-American and Jewish.[7]
Career
Mosley started writing at 34 and has penned more than forty books, 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 named Mosley as one of his favorite authors.[8]
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 and 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 shortly after its release.[17]
Former literature professor Harold Heft argued for Mosley's inclusion in the literary canon of Jewish-American writers.[18] 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 explained 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."[7]
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"
^Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."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)
