Gerald Early

Last updated

Gerald L. Early
Born
Gerald Lyn Early

(1952-04-21) April 21, 1952 (age 72)
Alma mater University of Pennsylvania (BA)
Cornell University (MA, PhD)
Occupation(s) Professor
Author
Employer Washington University in St. Louis
Known for American literature; African-American culture; Non-fiction prose, Baseball, Jazz music, Prizefighting, Motown
SpouseIda Early (1977–present)
Children2
Website Faculty page for Gerald Early at Washington University in St. Louis

Gerald Lyn Early (born April 21, 1952) is an American essayist and American culture critic. He is currently the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters, of English, African studies, African-American studies, American culture studies, and Director, Center for Joint Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. [1]

Contents

He also served as a consultant on Ken Burns' documentary films Baseball , Jazz , Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson , The War , and Muhammad Ali . He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio's Fresh Air . His essays have appeared in numerous editions of Best American Essays series. He writes on topics as diverse as American literature, the Korean War, African-American culture, Afro-American autobiography, non-fiction prose, baseball, jazz, prizefighting, Motown, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis Jr. [1]

In 2024, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. [2]

Background and education

Early was born on April 21, 1952, in Philadelphia, the son of Henry Early and Florence Fernandez Oglesby. His father, a baker, died when Early was nine months old, leaving his mother, a preschool teacher, to raise him and his two sisters on her own. Living in a poor area of the city, Early grew up befriending members of the Fifth and the South Street gangs, though he never became a member himself. Instead he focused on scholarly pursuits, graduating cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. During Early's undergraduate years, he was introduced to the writings of Amiri Baraka and later credited the poet and playwright with influencing his own work. Early developed much of his writing style through involvement with the university newspaper. Ironically, his first major piece was a journalistic foray into the gang-related murder of a cousin. [3]

After earning his B.A. degree, Early remained in Philadelphia, where he became employed by the city government. He also spent six months monitoring gang activities through the Crisis Intervention Network, before resuming his course work at Cornell University, where he eventually earned a doctorate in English literature in 1982. Early landed his first teaching job as an assistant professor of black studies at St. Louis's Washington University in 1982. He steadily rose to a full professorship in both the English and the renamed African and Afro-American studies departments by 1990. [4]

Personal life

On August 27, 1977, Early married Ida Haynes, a college administrator. They have two children, Linnet Kristen Haynes Early and Rosalind Lenora Haynes Early.

Awards and honors

Early won a Whiting Award in 1988 for creative nonfiction.

For his essay collection The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, he won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award.

He has been nominated twice for the Grammy Award for Best Album Notes. Once in 2001, for Yes I Can! The Sammy Davis Jr. Story, and again in 2002 for Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words From The Harlem Renaissance.

On September 5, 2007, Early was honored by Washington University with the unveiling of a portrait painted by Jamie Adams that hangs in the Journals Reading Room of the university's Olin Library.

In 2013, Early was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. [5]

On February 19, 2022, the Chicago suburb of Park Forest rededicated Early Street, initially named for the Confederate general, in Gerald Early's honor in an effort to celebrate the historic diversity of the village. [6]

Works

Editing work

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles R. Johnson</span> American writer

Charles Richard Johnson is an American scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southern United States literature</span> American literature about the Southern United States; literature by writers from that region

Southern United States literature consists of American literature written about the Southern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during the colonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period of slavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects. However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Molefi Kete Asante</span> American academic (born 1942)

Molefi Kete Asante is an American professor and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently a professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Sweet</span> Canadian philosopher (born 1955)

William Sweet is a Canadian philosopher, and a past president of the Canadian Philosophical Association and of the Canadian Theological Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture</span> Public research library in New York City

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard between West 135th and 136th Streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, it has, almost from its inception, been an integral part of the Harlem community. It is named for Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frederick O'Neal</span>

Frederick O'Neal was an American actor, theater producer and television director. He founded the American Negro Theater, the British Negro Theatre, and was the first African-American president of the Actors' Equity Association. He was also known for his work behind the scenes as a revolutionary trade unionist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Negro</span> Term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance

"New Negro" is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke in his anthology The New Negro.

Todd Boyd, aka "Notorious Ph.D.", is the Katherine and Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race & Popular Culture and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Boyd is a media commentator, author, producer, consultant and scholar. He is considered an expert on American popular culture and is known for his pioneering work on cinema, media, hip hop culture, fashion, art and sports. Boyd received his PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa in 1991 and began his professorial career at USC in the fall of 1992.

Epifanio San Juan Jr., also known as E. San Juan Jr., is a known Filipino American literary academic, Tagalog writer, Filipino poet, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist, video/film maker, editor, and poet whose works related to the Filipino Diaspora in English and Filipino writings have been translated into German, Russian, French, Italian, and Chinese. As an author of books on race and cultural studies, he was a "major influence on the academic world". He was the director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Storrs, Connecticut in the United States. In 1999, San Juan received the Centennial Award for Achievement in Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines because of his contributions to Filipino and Filipino American Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alain LeRoy Locke</span> American philosopher and writer (1885–1954)

Alain LeRoy Locke was an American writer, philosopher, and educator. Distinguished in 1907 as the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, Locke became known as the philosophical architect—the acknowledged "Dean"—of the Harlem Renaissance. He is frequently included in listings of influential African Americans. On March 19, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Neal</span> American scholar of theater (1937– 1981)

Larry Neal or Lawrence Neal was an American writer, poet, critic and academic. He was a notable scholar of African-American theater, well known for his contributions to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a major influence in both New York and Chicago, pushing for black culture to focus less on integration with White culture, rather than celebrating its differences within an equally important and meaningful artistic and political field, thus celebrating Black heritage.

Houston Alfred Baker Jr. is an American scholar specializing in African-American literature and Distinguished University Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Baker served as president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the journal American Literature, and has authored several books, including The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984), and Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (1993), as well as editing literary collections. Baker was included in the 2006 textbook Fifty Key Literary Theorists, by Richard J. Lane.

William Boyd Allison Davis was an American educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar who became the second African American to hold a full faculty position at a major white university when he joined the staff of the University of Chicago in 1942, after only Dr. Julian H. Lewis, where he served for the balance of his academic life. He was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation.

Eugene B. Redmond is an American poet, and academic. His poetry is closely connected to the Black Arts Movement and the city of East St. Louis, Illinois.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward W. Crosby</span> American academic administrator (1932–2021)

Edward Warren Crosby, was an African-American professor/administrator emeritus, in the Department of Pan-African Studies at Kent State University (KSU). As a pioneer in the field of Black education his most notable accomplishments include the establishment of Black History Month and the Department of Pan-African Studies at KSU. The Institute for African American Affairs (1969) and the Center of Pan-African Culture (1970) were two of the first institutions of their kind to be established at institutions of higher education.

The Black Scholar (TBS) is a journal founded in California, in 1969, by Robert Chrisman, Nathan Hare, and Allan Ross. It is the third oldest Black studies journal in the US, after the NAACP’s The Crisis and the Journal of African American History. The journal is currently housed at Boston University's Program in African American Studies. Originally published 10 times a year, and without peer review, the journal introduced peer review and became a quarterly in 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Louis Gates Jr.</span> American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950)

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.

Roger Fletcher Gibson Jr. was an American philosopher specializing in epistemology and the philosophy of language. He was best known as a leading exponent of the philosophy of W. V. Quine.

Herman H. Dreer (1888–1981) was an American academic administrator, educator, educational reformer, activist, author, editor, Baptist minister, and civil rights leader. He is best known for writing curriculum and programming for teaching African American History at most grade levels for early 20th-century public schools. Dreer is also credited with initiating Black History Month observance in the United States, alongside Carter G. Woodson.

References

  1. 1 2 "Gerald Early". Department of African and African-American Studies. Washington University in St. Louis. May 4, 2017. Retrieved May 21, 2023.
  2. "The American Philosophical Society Welcomes New Members for 2024". American Philosophical Society. May 20, 2024. Retrieved July 15, 2024.
  3. "Answers.com Profile of Gerald Early". PBS . Archived from the original on March 10, 2013. Retrieved August 28, 2017.
  4. "Answers.com Ibid". PBS . Archived from the original on March 10, 2013. Retrieved August 28, 2017.
  5. St. Louis Walk of Fame. "St. Louis Walk of Fame Inductees". stlouiswalkoffame.org. Archived from the original on October 31, 2012. Retrieved April 25, 2013.
  6. "Rules Meeting of the Board of Trustees Held Remotely". Village of Park Forest. March 22, 2021. Retrieved September 27, 2022.