Walter Mosley

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.

Personal life
Mosley was born in Los Angeles, California. His mother, Ella, was Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk. Her ancestors had immigrated from Russia. 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.

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. He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School, in 1970. 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. 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. One of his tutors, there, Edna O'Brien, became a mentor and encouraged him, saying: "You're Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches, therein."

Mosley still resides in New York City.

He says that he identifies as both African-American and Jewish, with strong feelings for both groups.

Career
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. 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 Panther Paul Coates.

His first published book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was the basis of a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington, and the following year, a ten part abridgement of the novel by Margaret Busby, read by Paul Winfield, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The world premiere of Mosley's first play, The Fall of Heaven, was staged at the Playhouse in the Park, Cincinnati, Ohio, in January 2010.

Mosley has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards. He is on the board of the TransAfrica Forum.

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."

In 2019, after working in the writers room for the 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.

Awards and honors

 * 1996 – Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Literary Award for RL's Dream
 * 1996 – O. Henry Award for a Socrates Fortlow story
 * 1998 - Anisfield Wolf Award, for works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America
 * 2001 – Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for Richard Pryor's …And It's Deep Too!
 * 2004 – Honorary doctorate from the City College of New York
 * 2005 – "Risktaker Award" from the Sundance Institute for both his creative and activist efforts
 * 2006 – First recipient of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award for his young adult novel 47
 * 2007– NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction, for Blonde Faith
 * 2009– NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction, for The Long Fall
 * 2013 – Inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame
 * 2014 – NAACP Image Award-nominated for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction, for Little Green: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
 * 2014 – Langston Hughes Medal from the City College of New York
 * 2016 – Named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America (see Edgar Award)
 * 2019 – Edgar Award for Best Novel for Down the River Unto the Sea
 * 2020 – National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
 * 2021 – NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction, The Awkward Black Man
 * 2023 – Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger – for lifetime achievement

Non-series novels

 * RL's Dream (1995)
 * Blue Light (1998)
 * Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (2001)
 * The Man in My Basement (2004)
 * Walking the Line (2005), a novella in the Transgressions series
 * The Wave (2005)
 * 47 (2005)
 * Fortunate Son (2006)
 * Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel (2006)
 * Diablerie (2007)
 * The Tempest Tales (2008)
 * The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2010)
 * Parishioner (2012)
 * Odyssey (2013)
 * Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (2014)
 * The Further Tales of Tempest Landry (2015)
 * Inside a Silver Box (2015)
 * John Woman (2018)
 * The Awkward Black Man (2020), short stories
 * Touched (2023)

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)
 * Little Green (2013)
 * Rose Gold (2014)
 * Charcoal Joe (2016)
 * Blood Grove (2021)
 * Farewell, Amethystine (2024)

Fearless Jones mysteries

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

Leonid McGill mysteries

 * The Long Fall (2009)
 * Known to Evil (2010)
 * When the Thrill Is Gone (2011)
 * All I Did Was Shoot My Man (2012)
 * And Sometimes I Wonder About You (2015)
 * Trouble Is What I Do (2020)

Socrates Fortlow books

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

Crosstown to Oblivion

 * The Gift of Fire / On the Head of a Pin (2012)
 * Merge / Disciple (2012)
 * Stepping Stone / The Love Machine (2013)

King Oliver books

 * Down the River unto the Sea (2018)
 * Every Man a King (2023)
 * Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right (2025)

Graphic novels

 * Maximum Fantastic Four (2005, with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby)
 * The Thing: The Next Big Thing (2022, with Tom Reilly)

Plays

 * The Fall of Heaven (2011)
 * Lift (2014)

Nonfiction

 * 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)
 * This Year You Write Your Novel (2007)
 * Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation (2011) ISBN 978-1-56858-642-7
 * Elements of Fiction (2019)

Films and television

 * Fallen Angels: Fearless (1995) (TV)
 * Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
 * Always Outnumbered (1998) (TV)
 * "Little Brother", episode of Masters of Science Fiction (2007) (TV)
 * Snowfall (TV), consulting producer, episode writer: "Prometheus Rising" (2018)
 * Star Trek: Discovery (2019) (TV)
 * The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2022), executive producer
 * Justified: City Primeval (2023) (TV), consulting producer