Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley
Born	January 12, 1952 (age 56) Los Angeles, California

Walter Ellis Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is a prominent 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 and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; it is perhaps his most popular work.

Biography

Personal life

Mosley was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Ella (née Slatkin), a personnel clerk, and Leroy Mosley, a school librarian.¹² His father was African-American and his mother Jewish.³⁴ He lives in New York City.

Career

Mosley has written over 20 books in a variety of categories, including non-mystery fiction, afrofuturist science fiction and non-fiction politics, and has been translated into 21 languages. Mosley's fame increased in 1992 when then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favorite authors. Two of his books have been made into films or television specials; his first published book, Devil in a Blue Dress, became a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington.

Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including the Anisfield Wolf Award, an honor given to works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America. He was a finalist for the NAACP Award in Fiction and won the 1996 Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Literary Award for RL's Dream. He was an O. Henry Award winner in 1996 (for a Socrates Fortlow story). In 2005 the Sundance Institute gave him a "Risktaker Award" for both his creative and activist efforts. In 2006 he was the first recipient of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award for his young adult novel 47.

Mosley holds an honorary doctorate from the City College of New York, is on the Board of Trustees for Goddard College, and has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards.

Works

Easy Rawlins mysteries

• Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
• A Red Death (1991)
• White Butterfly (1992)
• Black Betty (1994)
• A Little Yellow Dog (1996)
• Gone Fishin' (1997)
• Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002)
• Six Easy Pieces (2003)
• Little Scarlet (2004)
• Cinnamon Kiss (2005)
• Blonde Faith (2007)

Fearless Jones mysteries

• Fearless Jones (2001)
• Fear Itself (2003)
• Fear of the Dark (2006)

Science Fiction

• Blue Light (1998)
• Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (2001)
• The Wave (2005)

Socrates Fortlow books

• Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997)
• Walkin' the Dog (1999)
• The Right Mistake (2008)

For Young Adults

• 47 (2005)

Other fiction

• RL's Dream (1995)
• The Man in My Basement (2004)
• Walking the Line (2005), a novella in the Transgressions series
• Fortunate Son (2006)

Erotica

• Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel (2006)
• Diablerie (2007)

Non-fiction

• Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking off the Dead Hand of History (2000)
• What Next: An African American Initiative Toward World Peace (2003)
• Life Out of Context: Which Includes a Proposal for the Non-violent Takeover of the House of Representatives (2006)
• For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day
• This Year You Write Your Novel (2007)

Art book

• Maximum Fantastic Four (2005)

Films and television

• Fallen Angels: Red Wind (1995) (TV)
• Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
• Always Outnumbered (1998) (TV)

Criticism and Scholarship

• 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.
• FINE, David, ed., Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays from James M. Cain to Walter Mosley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1995).
• FRIEBURGER, 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.
• LENNARD, John, Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007 [Genre Fiction Sightlines]).
• 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 [Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers])

References

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Walter Mosley

External links

• Mosley's official website
• Time Warner Books site on Mosley
• Powell Books interview of Walter Mosley