Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley
Walter Ellis Mosleyis 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 and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; they are perhaps his most popular works...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 January 1952
CityLos Angeles, CA
CountryUnited States of America
You're talking about poor people whose lives have been destroyed. I'm upset about Katrina. I'm upset that our country follows a conservative economic program that allows poor people to lose their safety net.
You're talking about poor people whose lives have been destroyed,
I'm talking about black male heroes, ... I'm not the only one doing this but there's not a big genre of black male heroes, who aren't caricatures.
The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.
People don't understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they're reading when they're talking to you about their books.
It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.
Octavia Butler has been a beacon for thousands of us. This award will continue her legacy making sure that others will find their way to harbor.
What I want to do is give people who've been there a chance to recreate that world and those who've haven't been there a chance to create it, ... For a lot of people, it's an alien land, the world of black Los Angeles.
The reason I'm a writer is because I'm a writer. The reason I'm going through all these different genres is I'm trying to lay out a landscape for black male heroes.
It's 1966, Easy has to come to San Francisco,
It's a black erotic novel 25 percent of it is explicit sex,
Until very recently, ... publishers weren't aware of the fact that African-Americans do so much reading.
My father's life was so decimated by his earliest experiences. His mother died when he was 7 years old, which he always said was the worst experience in his life. When he was 8, his father disappeared and he was on his own from the age of 8.
When I went to school, there were no Black philosophers, at least none that I was aware of, who were recognized by Western universities.