Henry Louis Gates, Jr. directs the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is the host of the TV series, Finding Your Roots on PBS. He is one of America's best known public intellectuals, historians, literary critics, teachers, and filmmakers. He grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, where his father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor and his mother cleaned houses. He is known to friends as "Skip" because of how he has walked since sustaining a football injury at the age of 14 in 1964. This is a biography of this important West Virginian in the "African-American Leaders series, appropriate for adults and for high school students.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004.109 pages with an Index, Bibliography, and Chronology. Hardback with pictorial cover (library edition).