Anatole Broyard

Anatole Broyard (July 16, 1920 – October 11, 1990) was an American literary critic for The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded in 1851 and published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, "The Gray Lady"—named for its staid appearance and style—is regarded as a national newspaper of record...

. In addition to his reviews and columns, he published several books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works Intoxicated by My Illness and Kafka Was the Rage, A Greenwich Village Memoir were published after his death.

Since his death, Broyard's Louisiana Creole ethnicity has become a subject of much discussion.

Anatole Broyard (July 16, 1920 – October 11, 1990) was an American literary critic for The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded in 1851 and published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, "The Gray Lady"—named for its staid appearance and style—is regarded as a national newspaper of record...

. In addition to his reviews and columns, he published several books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works Intoxicated by My Illness and Kafka Was the Rage, A Greenwich Village Memoir were published after his death.

Since his death, Broyard's Louisiana Creole ethnicity has become a subject of much discussion. Anatole was the second of three children; he and his sister Lorraine, two years older, were fair-skinned, while Shirley, two years younger, was not so fair-skinned. They grew up in an extended Creole community in New Orleans. His family moved from New Orleans to New York, where they lived in a working-class and mixed-race community in Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located southwest of Queens on the western tip of Long Island. An independent city until its consolidation with New York in 1898, Brooklyn is New York City's most populous borough, with 2.5 million residents, and second largest in area...

.

Coming to professional life after World War II, Broyard was reluctant to discuss his history publicly. Because of this, he was sometimes "accused" of being a black man "passing

Passing (racial identity)

In the racial politics of the United States, racial passing refers to a person classified by society as a member of one racial group choosing to identify with a different group , usually by appearance...

" as white by some who criticized that he did not openly support African-American causes during the Civil Rights Movement or publicly identify himself as black. He had grown up in a Creole culture, however, that had different characteristics than identifying as black in New York. Broyard did discuss his African-American ancestry with a variety of friends, who were well aware of it. That he was part-black was well-known in the literary community of New York from the early 1950s, but it was an environment in which people from a variety of backgrounds remade themselves as members of an artistic milieu.

In 1961, Broyard married Alexandra (Sandy) Nelson, a white woman of Norwegian ancestry, who knew of his background. They had two children, Todd, born in 1964, and Bliss Broyard, born in 1966. (Broyard had previously been married to Aida Sanchez, a black Puerto Rican with whom he had had a daughter Gala, but the couple divorced after Broyard returned from military service in World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

.) The Broyards raised their family in Connecticut.

In 1997, the scholar Henry Louis Gates discussed his view of how Broyard had concealed his African-American ancestry in an essay in his book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, developed from an article in The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications...

entitled "The Passing of Anatole Broyard." In 2007, Broyard's daughter Bliss published a memoir, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets, in which she described her journey of learning about family mysteries.

Broyard and the way he dealt with his ethnic background were said to have been the inspiration for the character and situation of Coleman Silk in Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 story collection Goodbye, Columbus, and has since become one of the most honored authors of his generation: Roth's books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and...

's acclaimed novel The Human Stain

The Human Stain

The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth. It is set in late 1990s rural New England. Its first person narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, a character in previous Roth novels, including American Pastoral and I Married a Communist ; these two books form a loose trilogy with The Human...

. Roth however states there is no connection as he only learned about Broyard having African-American ancestry from a New Yorker article published months after he started writing the novel.

Broyard's cause of death was prostate cancer, diagnosed in 1989.

External links

• Anatole Broyard, 70, Book Critic And Editor at The Times, Is Dead, The New York Times, Friday, October 12, 1990.
• Anatole Broyard a remembrance by Jim Burns, Penniless Press, Preston, England.
• "The Passing of Anatole Broyard" in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York, Random House, 1997.
• One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets by Bliss Broyard, Little, Brown and Company, 2007.
• Bliss Broyard: 'One Drop' and What It Means Fresh Air from WHYY, National Public Radio, September 27, 2007.
• Daughter Discovers Father's Black Lineage interview of Bliss Broyard, News & Notes, National Public Radio, October 2, 2007.
• Famous Black Lives Through DNA’s Prism, The New York Times, Tuesday, February 5, 2008.