Gerald Early

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he has taught since 1982. He also has courtesy appointment in the American Culture Studies Programs, the English Department, and MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture program at Washington University. He earned his undergraduate degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in English and American literature from Cornell University.

He is currently the chair of the African and African American Studies Department. He had previously served as director of the African and African American Studies Program from 1992-1999. He has also served as the director of the American Culture Studies Program, and was the founding director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University. He is also the executive editor of The Common Reader, Washington University’s new interdisciplinary journal that is published under the auspices of the Provost. From 2009-2012, Early served on the advisory committee for tenure, promotion, and personnel for the School of Arts and Sciences.

Early is a noted essayist and American culture critic. His collections of essays include Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (1989); The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; This is Where I Came In: Essays on Black America in the 1960s (2003), and, most recently, A Level-Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports (2011). He is also the author of Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood (1994). He was twice nominated for Grammy Awards for writing album liner notes, of which Early has written many including Black Power: Music of a Revolution (2004), Miles Davis, Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary (2009), Q: The Musical Biography of Quincy Jones (2001), Vee-Jay: The Definitive Collection (2007), Motown: The Complete Motown Singles, Volume 2: 1962, The Sammy Davis Jr. Story (1999), and Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words from the Harlem Renaissance (2000).

Additionally, Early is a prolific anthologist. He launched the Best African American Essays 2010 with guest editor Randall Kennedy and Best African American Fiction 2010 with guest editor Nikki Giovanni. Both were part of the annual Best African American Essays and Best African American Fiction series published by Bantam Books for which Early served as the series editor during the life of the series. His other anthologies include The Cambridge Companion to Boxing (2019); Approaches to Teaching Baraka’s Dutchman (2018, with Matthew Calihman); The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader (2001); Miles Davis and American Culture (2001); The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998); Ain’t But a Place: An Anthology of African American Writings About St. Louis (1998): and Body Language: Writers on Sport (1998). He has served as a consultant on several Ken Burns’ documentary films—Baseball; Jazz; The Tenth Inning; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; The War, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; and Jackie Robinson—all of which have aired on PBS. Early is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served or is currently serving on a number of non-profit boards in St. Louis including the Missouri History Museum, the Foundation Board of the St. Louis Public Library, Jazz St. Louis, and the Whitaker Foundation. He served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center where he enjoyed an appointment as the John Hope Franklin Fellow in 2001-2002. He was nominated by President Obama to serve on the National Council on the Humanities, was confirmed by the Senate and began his five-term in August 2013. He was awarded a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 2013.

He is completing a book with his daughter, Rosalind, a professional writer and editor, about an African American festival in Philadelphia called Odunde, one of the largest black street festivals in the country and the biggest public event for adherents of the Yoruba religion in the United States. His longer-term projects include a study of the Korean War and a book about conservatism in the United States.