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Walter Mosley was a 35-year-old computer programmer when he enrolled in the graduate writing program at City College in 1987. Just three years later–while still a student–he published “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the debut novel that established him as a new force in American fiction.
Three decades and 60 books later, Mosley has received the National Book Foundation’s 2020 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The lifetime achievement award—whose previous recipients include Toni Morrison, Edmund White, E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer—honors a literary career born and nurtured at CUNY. It’s a career that includes founding a program at CCNY to open doors for minorities in publishing, an industry long known for its lack of diversity. We talked with Mosley about his life, his work and his decades-long bond with CUNY. Watch his award acceptance below.
Related Links
CUNY Congratulates Walter Mosley on NBF Honor
His Latest: The Awkward Black Man
About the City College Publishing Certificate Program
Episode Transcript
Rick Firstman: Walter Mosley was in his mid 30s when he enrolled in the graduate writing program at The City College of New York in 1987. Just three years later, even before earning his degree, Mosley published his debut novel, “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the bestseller that would later be made into a movie starring Denzel Washington. More than 60 books later, Mosley is among the country’s literary masters. And this month, the National Book Foundation is awarding him its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Mosley is the first African American man to win the lifetime achievement honor from the organization that presents the National Book Awards. Mosley’s life as a writer was born at CUNY, nurtured by faculty mentors and led him to establish a publishing certificate program at CCNY to open doors for minorities in an industry long known for its lack of diversity. I talked with Mosley about his life, his work, race, politics, and City College. Here’s our conversation.
Walter Mosley, thank you so much for coming on the CUNYcast and congratulations on this great honor from the National Book Foundation.
Walter Mosley: Why, thank you very much. I’m really happy about it.
RF: You’re in LA now during the pandemic? You have a place in Brooklyn also but you’re out there for a while?
WM: Yeah, I live in New York, I actually own a piece of Brooklyn so that’s mine. But, you know, I come out to LA a lot, you know, I’m from here. And also, you know, we do work with television shows and stuff, it’s easier to be here than not to.
RF: Right. And LA is where you grew up, of course, and where most of your novels are set. So I must say, I was unaware of your CUNY connection until I saw a reference to the City College publishing program in the announcement of the award. But the connection is even more pivotal, going to the very inception of your career as a writer. But I’m going to leave that as a little foreshadow and start even earlier in your story. You didn’t begin writing until you were in your 30s. But you’ve said that as a kid, you your head was filled with a lot of fantasies. So it sounds like you were, you know, a storyteller from the beginning. And you were your own first audience?
WM: Well yeah, you know, I was an only child, and my mother was an only child, my father was an orphan. And so, you know, we were very kind of alone and kind of used to being alone, all three of us. And, you know, I’d just be in my room making up stories, you know, adventures that I could be in, you know, that’s how it started. But I never thought of being a writer. I don’t think I ever wrote anything down. Like ever, actually, until I said, oh, maybe I could be a writer.
RF: So it was all in your head? Did you over the next, you know, 20 years of your life, was it somewhere in the back of your mind, or did it just sort of come out of nowhere?
WM: No, my notion of you know, kind of making up stories that I lived in, in my head has always been the case. So I was always thinking these things, but I never just thought about them as stories that I would write. I mean, I could tell people stories, but even that was not that much.
RF: Was there a theme to your stories?
WM: No, you know, it’s just kids stories, you know, it could be a book I was reading or, you know, a superhero I’d like to be or a television show that I’d seen that, you know, I wanted to be a part of that. You know, it was just making up things, fantasy.
RF: Right. Well, now, your family history is interesting. Your mother was Jewish from New York. Father was a black man from Louisiana. So tell me a little bit about them.
WM: My mother went to Hunter. She started Hunter. I think it was a Hunter High School, right? She went to that, she graduated Hunter High School when she was 15 and went to Hunter College and she graduated the college when she was 19. You know, she was very much ahead of herself and she was very much a Trotskyite, a political activist. All that stuff. My father was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, his, mother died when he was seven, his father disappeared, probably died when he was eight. And so he was on his own from then, you know, his connection to writing was kind of interesting. One of the things that he did when he was a kid, he, you know, he used to read pulp magazines, and he loved them. And he wanted to write stories. So he wrote actually a story, a Western that he sent to some, you know, one of the pulp publishers in Chicago. And they never answered, but about a half a year later, a year later maybe, he saw pretty much the same story published in a magazine. “All right, I can’t be a writer, right.” And I didn’t remember that story that my father told me when I was a kid until maybe my third or fourth book. Wow, you know, maybe I’m like, acting unconsciously acting out my father’s wishes, you know?
RF: So somehow they both made their way to California and met there?
WM: Yeah, my father had gone to World War II. And what he found kind of devastating about World War II is that he left with about 100 other guys from his part of Houston, Texas, and most of those guys made it back. You know, I mean, some people die no matter what, right? But hardly anybody was killed in battle or anything. And most of them made their way back. But when he got back to Fifth Ward Houston, Texas, almost everybody he knew was dead. Life was much harder sleeping in his own bed in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas, than it was being in the largest war in the history of the world. So he decided to move to California and my mother had come out, I don’t know, a lot of my relatives had moved to the west coast from New York, and especially the older ones, you know, staying out of the cold. And my mother came out to live with our cousin Lily. She met some guy, very, very rich guy who lived on one of those private streets toward downtown LA. But she was still politically active so she got a job at a school, you know, as a file clerk, and my father got a job at the same school as a janitor. And they met there. And not long after that, my mother went back to her husband and said, You know, I don’t love you. I’m breaking up with you. And that was it. I mean, they were together from then.
RF: Wow. So what was it like to be an interracial couple, and also for you to be the son of an interracial couple, back in the 50s and 60s?
WM: You know, it’s a really good question. Because, you know, no matter how many people you ask that question, you’re going to get different answers, I think. My parents were absolutely committed to the thought that I wouldn’t have to face those problems. So we lived in the hood, I lived in Watts and all that stuff and so whatever Watts had to offer I was a part of. But I never heard them talk about that kind of stuff. And they sheltered me from having to be aware and dealing with that kind of stuff until I was a teenager. So when I was a kid, I remember, you know, talking to my father about you know, Mom is white, she’s not white, she’s Jewish, and you know, you’re black. And you know, my father just said, “Walter. I’m black, you’re black. That’s it.” And so that was just me, I’m black, you know. So I came from different places like anybody with two different parents comes from different places, you know what I mean? When I got older, I was aware of racial issues. And you know, when I went to elementary school, I went this tny little school in LA called Victory Baptist Day School. And at Victory, you know, we studied Afro American history, you know, so I knew all this stuff, you know, about the history of black people, the history of white people, it’s just, it wasn’t in my mind, there wasn’t conflict between those things. And I think that when people usually talk about this stuff, they’re talking about the conflict. And, you know, there was no conflict. You know, my mother, my father, my life and, you know, and still today, like, I know, a lot of people who, you know, internally they have a lot of conflict over their biracial background, but I just don’t have it, you know, they never talked about it, right? They didn’t allow that kind of stuff to enter into life.
RF: You took a really circuitous route to the writing life. You said, you know, you went through your hippie phase, you went to college in Vermont, got a political science degree. So what were your ambitions in those years, in your early 20s?
WM: You know, the great thing about being a hippie, I don’t know if you remember, probably you do, I mean, it was very much what’s happening today, what’s today like, you know, yeah, there’s tomorrow and there’s plans and stuff but I wasn’t that worried about it. I needed to make money, I need to pay my rent, so I had jobs, I was a computer programmer, you know, a cook for a while, and a potter for a while, you know, I just, you know, did that stuff. I didn’t mind doing it. I thought it was fun. I didn’t think that that was going to be the definition of my life. And so one day, I’m just sitting there, and I’m thinking, and I write a sentence. And I go, Wow, that’s a good sentence. Maybe I’ll try to be a writer. And even then my decision was not so much that I was going to, you know, get published and get, you know, so-called famous and this and that, I thought it would be really great if I could write a short story, beginning, middle, and end. That would make me so happy. And you know, that’s what I went after, that’s what I tried to do. I finally got it done. And, you know, one thing led to another and I became, you know, a writer. But it wasn’t really my… I wasn’t expecting that.
RF: So you were working as a computer programmer and you were working for Mobil Oil?
WM: Mobil Oil, home insurance, Dean Witter. I worked for a lot of people.
RF: So you were you kind of a freelancer?
WM: I worked as a freelancer at the end. You know, you make twice as much money. It’s great because they didn’t have to pay for all that retirement, medical, vacations, all that stuff. You paid for everything. So you you worked your hours and got your money.
RF: And you came to New York when you were about 30? What brought you to the city?
WM: I was in Boston and you know, and there’s a, what was the Irish section, Charlestown? I think it was. Anyway, it was a Friday afternoon, a young black man had gotten his check. He had a check cashing thing with I think 7-Eleven. And so he walked a block into Charlestown to 7-Eleven, walked past the bar, and people saw him, and when he walked back, the people ran out of the bar and beat him to death. That was my experience of Boston. Boston was an incredibly racist city, then. People tell me it’s not anymore, and I go, and it doesn’t look like it so maybe it isn’t, but it was so hard. I gotta get out of here. You know, I know New York was very violent at that time. But, uh, at least, you know, they just kill me just because they want to kill me, not because I’m black. So I’m gonna move to New York. And I did, it was, you know, it was a good thing.
RF: And so you’re at this point, you’re working as a computer programmer, and just kind of writing on the side just sort of for fun?
WM: Well, I’m still writing for fun, you know. The greatest idea is do something for fun and get paid for it, right?
RF: And then you made this decision to apply to the writing program at City College, and you were in your mid 30s at that point.
WM: Yeah, I got into the graduate writing program at City. And that was really a great moment for me.
RF: So you were clearly a level up and making this serious at that point?
WM: Well, you know, when you take a writing program anywhere, the chances are the job you’re going to get is teaching. So, I did think that, I said, Well, if I study writing, and I get some stories published, and maybe win some little award or something, then maybe I could teach college in the Midwest, teach other people how to write, you know, that’s what I thought was possibility. I wasn’t thinking about it that hard. But you know, to be in the school, I spent every day around people who were writers. You know, in America, it’s very hard for anybody to pay any attention. If you say you’re a writer, they walk away. And, so I was with a group of people who wrote fiction and poetry and some nonfiction, and it was great.
RF: And you found a mentor, and it happened to be Edna O’Brien, the legendary Irish novelist and playwright.
WM: She was one of my teachers and a very important person in my career. But my mentor at City College, I had really two of them. The major one is Frederic Tuten, who taught there, and then Bill Matthews, the poetry teacher who has since died. And it was a really very supportive program situation. And unlike most of these crazy places, it didn’t cost you you know, your future 15 years to pay off or something.
RF: So what was your first try at publishing a book?
WM: I wrote a book that Edna asked me to write. I wrote a couple of chapters, and she thought it was great, she said [mimicking accent], “Walter, write a novel.” And I went, Okay, I’ll write my novel. And it was a book called “Gone Fishin.’ ” And it’s my major characters from the mystery series, Easy Rawlins and Mouse but it wasn’t mystery, it was just them in Texas, in this mythical town called Pariah. And they were, you know, they had an adventure, it’s kind of a coming of age story for these two guys. And I sent that story out to a lot of people, and they all said, you know, very good writing, we really like it a lot, but it’s not commercial. What they meant when they said it’s not commercial is that that it was the belief in publishing at the time that white people didn’t read about black people, black women didn’t like black men and black men didn’t read. So who would buy your book? You know, black people in Texas. And okay, they didn’t want to publish it, that was fine with me, I just started writing another book about Easy and Mouse because I was enjoying writing about them, you know, and that’s what I thought, well, you should do what you enjoy. And that was “Devil in a Blue Dress.” And that, you know, that was bought.
RF: Clearly. So Edna O’Brien was encouraging you. She was really fascinated by your identity, right?
WM: Yeah, she was. And I mean, that’s not what interested me about Edna. And really, I already knew my identity, I didn’t need her to tell me. But she was such an extraordinary writer. And in my opinion, paid more attention to students than was even reasonable, you know. I was just so happy to be around her. And when she said, Well, go write a novel, she had such impact on me that six weeks later I had written that novel. By the way, I published “Gone Fishin’ ” four or five years later with Black Classic Press, my good friend Paul Coates who has a publishing company. And it did very well, you know, it’s a good book, actually, it’s just that you have to convince people that black men would read it.
RF: And you had to just kind of ignore what people were telling you about why they wouldn’t publish it.
WM: You know, you accept the fact that they’re not publishing it. [They say] “Now let me explain to you why…” and I really don’t care why, you’re not publishing it so let me move on to the next person. I still feel like that.
RF: So Easy Rawlins, tell me about the character and where he came from. And what’s sustained him through 15 or so mysteries.
WM: In today’s world, if you want to be a part of that world, you have to have a place in history. And the best way to have a place in history is through culture and popular culture. So books, television shows, you know, political characters, people who people who talk, you know, who you see, and you and you say, Wow, this is important what they’ve done, what they’re thinking. And one of the best ways to do that is through literature, because literature informs all those other things. And so I wanted to write stories about the black migration from the western south into Los Angeles and somewhat San Francisco and how those people lived. So I wanted to talk about their lives so I have this perfect structure, which is the mystery, which everybody reads mysteries. And the more different the characters are the better because, you know, then they get to see other parts of the world. So I’m gonna write a mystery about a guy who’s come from the south, he’s living in Los Angeles, a lot like my father but he wasn’t my father. And who becomes a detective, and who moves through that black world as a detective, solving problems and running into difficulties that, you know, people run into if they’re black walking around the streets of Los Angeles.
RF: And there’s also Socrates Fortlow, another recurring character who comes from a different place. What were you trying to write about through him?
WM: What’s really funny, I wrote the book “Black Betty” and my publisher said, Well, Walter, you know, you’re writing these books about these black people from the South who moved into the West, and they’re kind of literary and so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna send you on a book tour of Jewish book fairs in the south. And I said, Wow, that’s like a really fun idea because, you know, they go to the book fairs they’ve already read all the books but in the four or five places I went, there’s always in the right side is these three little old ladies who are sitting there saying, well, we see where your father is in these books but where’s your mother? Now they asked me the question and they never meant it because they knew where. I think that Easy, who’s very well read, is reading a book about Hadrian, the Roman Emperor. And they said, Hadrian, that’s where your mother is. And I’m saying, Hadrian is not Jewish, and black people read. What I did was I said, I need to write about a black philosopher, right. And, you know, a lot of different ways that could come about that. But it ended up a man who really has made some terrible mistakes in his life, who is a convicted murderer, who did murder, without feeling, and now he’s trying to become better. So his experience, he spent 27 years in prison. And when he comes out of prison, he’s trying to make a better life for himself and the people that he’s around, living deep, deep, deep in the ‘hood. And that was really why I wanted to write about a philosopher that these ladies weren’t going to claim. And I love Socrates, I actually want to write about him again, have to think about that. Thinking about it lately.
RF: So in these in these years, and then through the ’90s, when you were now successful, “Devil in a Blue Dress” was made into a big movie with Denzel Washington, and you’re having experiences with the publishing industry, and it leads you to want to start this program at City College, this publishing industry certificate program, in 98. So tell me, what was the genesis? And what did you do to get that going?
WM: I was part of the literary world. And I was involved a lot with publishers at one point. And publishers, you know, would get upset with me because they would say, Well, look, we hired a black person. They probably knew his name. But he left, you know, what can we do? That’s what happened. They said, Why do you think we don’t have black people working here? And I said, obvious, man, it’s because you’re racist. I mean, like, who isn’t in America? It’s not a terrible insult, it’s just true. And I realized that he’s saying that publishers were not going to help. You know, any business in America that doesn’t get money from the government doesn’t feel it necessary to integrate, hire people of different races, or genders or whatever. They don’t have to do it, if they don’t get money from the government, because the only power the government has is to say we’re not gonna give you any more money. And publishing is one of those those things so that, you know, it’s mostly, you know, white people, a lot of people who are from the Ivy League schools. Not only. And so, I understood the problem, I had a friend, a woman who was an editor who almost quit because she’d gotten a job and she went to her boss and she said, I want to publish this book. And she says what’s it about? She said, well, it’s a nonfiction book about Black women’s hair. And the chief editor said, Well, no, you can’t do that. Women aren’t interested in their hair. And she said, Well, Black women are. And the woman is like, Well, you know, that sounds kind of racist to me. And you know it took a really long time, a few years to publish the book and it was a big success. So I started the institute at City College. The people teaching it are people working in the industry and donated their time. And there’s all these other students that you get to know so as they slowly start to get jobs in the industry, if they run into a problem, like the woman who said that, they can call their friends, they can call their teachers, and they can discuss it. And so I thought, this is a way to really, you know, begin it’s only a beginning, to integrate the New York publishing industry. But not just to publish books, you know, publishing books, okay, fine, publishing books, writing books, great. But in marketing and publicity, in, you know, in editing, you know, in all the various aspects of the business of publishing.
RF: I was talking with David Unger, who runs the program and who, you know well, and he was telling me that there have been a couple hundred graduates of the certificate program and working in publishing. So it seems like it’s had a real impact.
WM: Yeah, it’s working. It’s great.
RF: So I want to talk about politics a little bit, it’s hard to avoid, not that we want to, but you’ve said that writing fiction has to be a little political, which I thought was a very interesting idea. Talk about that for a second.
WM: Well, you know, I mean, you have to talk about the world that people are living in in order for any place to make sense. Either that or to completely make up a new world, a fantasy world of science fiction, a secret society that no one else knows anything about. But in most books, you’re writing about the world you live in. So like, if I’m going to write a book, and I’m going to be talking about some character, it could be a guy, you know, like a guy who’s a bare knuckle boxer, whatever. But I can’t forget, you know, that black people could be kept out of things everywhere, I can’t forget that women didn’t have the right to vote, didn’t really have control over their own property, their own bodies, their own children. You have to remember what the world is that you’re dealing with. And your interpretation of that world is a political act. So you might be saying a woman didn’t have the right to vote and they were happier then, you might say something like that, well, okay, that’s a political act, you saying that. Or you could say it was too bad and we needed to work harder. Or we might say, I just didn’t get it. But whatever you’re going to do, you’re going to talk about the world that we live in. And in doing that you’re making a political act. When Raymond Chandler is writing about LA, you know, and him and 1000 other people writing detective novels about LA, and there’s maybe only one or two black people ever in the books, that’s a political thought. You’re excluding people. When Nathaniel Hawthorne is writing about New England in the Scarlet Letter and he neglects to talk about slavery, that’s a political act, because slavery was run out of New England at that time. All of it is something that you have to know, that you have to think about. And, you know, I don’t care what you think, we might beat polar opposites politically, but, you know, you have to make a statement about the world and about the people who live in that world.
RF: Which of your books do you think was the most relevant politically in its moment?
WM: God, you know, it’s so hard to answer. You know, I’ve written a few, I think, four political monographs, so they’re all politics, just my thoughts about politics. But in the novels, it’s so hard to say. I figure the ones that people complain about the most, people complain a lot about Easy Rawlins because they say, Well, you know, you’re always talking about that race stuff, like he was driving this fancy car down the street and police stopped him four times, you know that would never happen. And I say, no it happens every day, what are you talking about? You know, I did a thing recently, where I did a lecture on writing. And part of it, I was talking about your identity, you’re Black or Irish of whatever it is, you have this racial identity, you have this cultural, historical identity. And you know, where does that come about in your writing? And certain people were saying that’s too much, I don’t like it, I already know the stuff, I don’t need to be taught that about my writing. I just need to know how to write the right sentences. And I’m thinking, no, that’s not what you need to know. You need to know who you are writing this novel.
RF: Interesting. So of course, this year, we’re all gripped by real life, politics, racial justice, and the fate of our democracy itself. So we’re recording this a week before Election Day. We don’t know what’s going to happen and how long it’s going to last. But where’s your head on everything in terms of the election?
WM: Well, you know, I’m optimistic about one aspect, you know, I do I think that Trump, and those people who are afraid of him have, you know, put themselves in a really bad position politically, and I don’t think that he nor many people around him are going to survive the onslaught of the upcoming election. Let’s say I’m right about that. I mean, I could be wrong. But you know, I think that the left, which is really the center, is going to kind of take over a lot of the the places in the government, you know, the Congress, the White House, but I feel that Trump has done such a good job of polarizing and underscoring that which was already polarized. And that we have kind of mindlessly fallen into that that kind of dialogue, where we’re using language to try to hurt people, to try to frighten people in the same way that the president has been doing. And I think that’s wrong. And I think that we have to, to really learn how to be, you know, objective, and how to be what they call politic about what we’re doing. You know, and I think that comes up with things like defunding the police. I agree that we need to reimagine law enforcement in America, but the idea of saying, Well, I’m just going to take money away from these people and that’s going to make it better, it’s ridiculous. And people are using that language because they’re angry. And I think that the anger has to be drained out of language. So yeah, we’re going to reimagine law enforcement so everybody’s going to be safer, and everybody is going to get a fair shake.
RF: Yeah, there’s clearly just intense emotion all over the place that has to be drained. You know, I guess about fifteen years ago you wrote about a new kind of black power that would operate outside the political parties, in pressing for change. So where are you now, particularly in light of this moment of racial reckoning we’ve been in this year?
WM: Well, you know, it’s interesting, I think that people’s responses to it have been, basically, according to how old they are, what they’ve experienced before, and I was talking to someone who’s really upset, she actually thought that the world was going to fall apart soon, that America was going to, you know, just shake apart because of, the marches, Black Lives Matter, all this stuff, you know. Black woman, but you know, she’s just saying, I mean, how can we go through this and not destroy who we are? And, you know, I’m saying, but this is so mild compared to the Watts riots of 1965 that I was in, you know, this is so mild compared to the second riots. And it’s amazingly optimistic because it’s not just Black people going out there getting shot down by the police, it’s all kinds of races and genders that are out there saying let’s make this a better world. And she’s upset to tears, and I’m thinking, wow, you know, this is like a better world. So it depends on what you’re thinking.
RF: That’s very good point.
WM: I think 43 people were killed in the Watts riots and ’65 and like 40 of them were Black people.
RF: And you were right there.
WM: Yeah. I was there. I was there there.
RF: So you have a new book of stories out?
WM: “The Awkward Black Man” came out on September 15. It’s a group of 17 short stories about unlikely Black protagonists, people who have really deep internal emotional problems or people who are, you know, can’t quite get the right thing. People who are very political or very much into science but they’re awkward, they’re odd, they don’t fit exactly right. They might do one thing well, but they do three things not so well. And, talking about these characters for me, it’s so interesting because it’s about people and a world that we don’t usually talk about. Black characters in film and also in books have kind of definite little characteristics, they’re going to either be Sojourner Truth, or they’re going to be A Pimp Called Slick Back. And I didn’t want those characters in this particular book. And it’s fun.
RF: And you’re also working on TV?
WM: Yeah, I’m working on the show “Snowfall,” it’s been out for about five years, John Singleton show. I’ve sold the Easy Rawlins series to a big producer, we’ll see what they’re gonna do. I’m trying with Sam Jackson to make a film, like a miniseries, based on my novel “The Last days of Ptolemy Gray.” And a few other things.
RF: So you’re busy as ever. You’ve got a lifetime achievement award but your lifetime is very much continuing in this writing world.
WM: It is indeed. Things are going well, I’m not complaining.
RF: That’s great. Well, and I’m glad to hear that CUNY had a part in your success.
WM: Yeah. It was a big part. You know, I’m so angry at the big private, semi private universities that, you know, charge you forty or fifty thousand dollars a year to teach you creative writing, you know, and it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t cost anything, they don’t need microscopes or spaceships or anything. But, you know, all this money and they do it to make a profit, not to make writers. And, you know, when you go to City or Brooklyn College, it’s so wonderful. You you pay whatever you pay to go to, you know, it costs something, but you’re not going to go broke for the rest of your life doing it. And it was really, it was really wonderful to do that and to be there.
RF: Well, it’s a great note to end on. Thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate it and congratulations again.
WM: All right. Thanks a lot. See you in the next book.