Addison Gayle, Jr.

Writer, educator, and scholar

• Born: June 2, 1932
• Birthplace: Newport News, Virginia
• Died: October 3, 1991
• Place of death: New York, New York

Gayle was a prolific writer and a literary critic, who rooted the Black Arts movement with the landmark anthology The Black Aesthetic (1971). As a leading architect of the movement, Gayle supported a rich new era of African American writers and artists.

Early Life

The early life of Addison Gayle, Jr. (A-dih-suhn gayl) was a direct testimony to the ills of racism and poverty. He was born June 2, 1932, in southern Newport News, Virginia. His family was poor and his parents, Addison Gayle, Sr., and Carrie Holloman, separated when he was young. Addison Gayle, Jr., wrote in his autobiography of the self-hate he battled because of his black skin, fighting both white racism and a caste system of skin color favoring light-skinned African Americans. Gayle had a strong intellect that was not appreciated by classmates and teachers. He drew inspiration from a steady diet of reading, which included such writers as Richard Wright and Fyodor Dostoevski, In high school, Gayle began writing short stories. With an ambition to become a writer, he finished a three-hundred-page novel, Fear Not, Young Blood, that was read by critic Saunders Redding, who encouraged him to continue writing. After graduating from high school, Gayle joined the U.S. Air Force in 1950, but left after only six months because of a heart condition. Gayle became dispirited and troubled when he was unable to get his writing published. He could not find sustaining intellectual stimulation, and he had been disappointed in a failed love affair. He moved from city to city, seeking work as a hospital orderly in Newark, Detroit, Philadelphia, and finally landing in were chosen. There he experienced incidents of police brutality and employment segregation, but he continued to set high goals for himself.

Life’s Work

Gayle enrolled in the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1960. Eventually obtaining full-time status, he received his B.A. in 1965. He then moved to California with his wife, Rosalie Norwood, and obtained his M.A. in literature from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1966. He was beginning to get his critical essays published in academic journals. Gayle later returned to New York, where he accepted a position as lecturer at CUNY. He would remain at the university to become a distinguished professor of English at Bernard M. Baruch College until his death from pneumonia in October, 1991.

The backdrop of Gayle’s early teaching career was the socially and politically charged era of the Civil Rights movement as it evolved into the more militant goals of the Black Power movement. His creative output bordered mainly on critical essays that began to receive wide publication in the growing scene of African American literary and cultural magazines. In 1969, Gayle edited the anthology Black Expression: Essays by and About Black Americans in the Creative Arts. This work became the first major anthology of the Black Arts movement. Along with the writings of the well-established Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the volume included that of many of the rising stars of the Black Arts movement, such as Hoyt Fuller, himself an influential editor; LeRoi Jones, who, as Amiri Baraka, would flourish into the movement’s strongest and most influential poet; poet Margaret Walker; and activist writer Eldridge Cleaver.

Seeing the need for theory and ideology that could support the rising chords of the Black Power and Black Nationalist movements, Gayle began to formulate ideas on a African American aesthetic that would eventually provide the Black Arts movement with a viable philosophical basis. In 1970, he published other work, including a volume of autobiographical essays, The Black Situation, and Bondage, Freedom, and Beyond: The Prose of Black America. In 1971, he produced the landmark anthology that some called the manifesto of the Black Arts movement, The Black Aesthetic.

Gayle pinned the goals of the Black Power movement to art and literature in his introduction and in essays in The Black Aesthetic. He argued that literature should become a moral force for change whose purpose, with logical, reasoned arguments, was to transform the American Negro into a black and help black people to move “out of the polluted mainstream of Americanism.” The black writer could be either an accommodationist or a nationalist. Because black writers would never be accepted by the American mainstream, Gayle explained, they must repudiate assimilation and realize themselves as revolutionary Africans in America, fighting for the survival of a black nation. The black writer must take responsibility for his image and create values, by which, to paraphrase the words of Wright, Negro people would struggle, live, and die.

Gayle wrote in the passion and energy of the militancy that grew out of the Civil Rights movement. There were critics of his thoughts but their views were often regarded by the rising core of writers, poets, dramatists and critics as counterrevolutionary to the needs of a black cultural autonomy. Among these young writers of radical thought and philosophy were Sonia Sanchez, Ishmael Reed, Haki Madhubuti, Larry Neal, Etheridge Knight, Toni Cade Bambara, and Nikki Giovanni, and Lorraine Hansberry. The older mainstay poets and writers, such as John Williams and Gwendolyn Brooks, became signposts.

Gayle attracted much attention as a respected and vital intellectual. Though he refused to become a spokesperson for the Black Arts movement, his academic schedule was filled with visiting lecture appearances at many institutions. He continued a prolific output, writing literary biographies of Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1971 and of Claude McKay in 1972. His widely respected Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son was published in 1980.

Gayle separated from his wife in 1971 and had a second marriage in his later years. The recurrent bouts of depression that affected his life were caused, he suggested, by his own self-hate. In 1977, he published his monumental autobiography Wayward Child: A Personal Odyssey.

Significance

Gayle is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Black Arts and Black Aesthetics movements. His critical work of anthologies, biographies, and essays not only helped to fulfill the scholarly requirements of the movement but also served to sustain the voices of the new and passionate writers in black literature.

Bibliography

Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Addison Gayle, Jr., Reader. Edited by Nathaniel Norment, Jr. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. This excellent compendium largely covers Gayle’s corpus of work, with important essays on black aesthetics and literature.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. New York: Anchor Press, 1975. Gayle’s historical analysis of the African American novel.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Wayward Child: A Personal Odyssey. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977. Gayle’s biography is deeply personal, with portrayals of his parents and details of racial incidents that affected his life.