Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Literary critic, historian and filmmaker
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a literary critic, historian and filmmaker who teaches at Harvard University. He hosts the PBS series Finding Your Roots.
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American Born 1950 in Keyser, United States
About Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Known since childhood as Skip, Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born in Keyser, West Virginia, in 1950. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and directs the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His work includes recovering some of the earliest known African-American novels, and he has written widely on placing African-American literature within the Western canon. He is the author of over twenty books, among them The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, Faces of America and In Search of Our Roots. His books also include The Black Church. For the film series The African Americans, he received an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award and a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award. Since 2012 he has hosted Finding Your Roots on PBS, where genealogy, history and genetics help reveal the stories of guests' ancestors.