The real Henry Louis Gates: public domain scholar
By Robert Nagle
Pay no attention to the fascinating hullabaloo involving the false arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. It’s unimportant. 
Henry Louis Gates deserves credit for discovering by accident the first African-American novel ever published in 1859. Here’s a fascinating mp3 Gates had in 1983 with literary interviewer Don Swaim about Our Nig . The mp3 interview (recorded early in Gates’ career) goes into detail about how Harriet Wilson’s publisher publicized the “sad plight” of Harriet Wilson as a way to sell more books. Some things never change!
I’m happy to report that Our Nig is available on Project Gutenberg. (It’s one of those early PG scans, and I think the hyphenation and formatting is not ideal, but it’s still readable and downloadable as EPUB.
The Gates interview was one of my favorites from the several hundred Wired for Books interview mp3s I heard over the past two years.
See also: a minor academic controversy about whether Our Nig was really first.
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