The man of letters

Albert Murray, the novelist, poet, and cultural critic, has been awarded the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal by Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, it was announced today. Murray, who is 90, is the author of many books. Institute director Henry Louis Gates Jr. said in a statement, "We present Albert Murray with the Du Bois Medal today to let him know that his life's work is not only valued, but also recognized as vital and central to our intellectual and artistic tradition."

Murray not only wrote of the century in which he lived most of his life, but lived it with many of its greatest names, who were his friends: Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Romare Bearden, Robert Penn Warren, Duke Ellington, and many others. My colleague Mark Feeney wrote a memorable profile of Murray in the Globe August 1, 1993, which was included in Roberta S. Maguire's anthology, "Conversations with Albert Murray" (University of Mississippi Press, 2000). From Mark's piece:

"Albert Murray is 'what a man of letters should and could be,' says the novelist John Edgar Wideman. 'He represents the best in thought and writing.' Walker Percy speculated that Murray's essay collection, The Omni-Americans, published in 1970, 'well may be the most important book on black-white relations in the United States, indeed on American culture, published in this generation.' Or there is what Ellington wrote about his friend 20 years ago, when Murray's first novel, Train Whistle Guitar, was published: 'He doesn't have to look it up. . . . If you want to know, look him up. He is the unsquarest person I know.' Short of having the pope call you the holiest person he knows, it's hard to imagine a more authoritative order of praise."