As a scholar, literary critic, and practicing biographer, Arnold Rampersad explores black culture, artistry, and experience. Racial themes dominate his theoretical writings, and in the two volumes of his biography of Langston Hughes (1986 and 1988) and his earlier study of the life and works of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976), Rampersad has narrated the lives of two important black Americans. The Life of Langston Hughes has won numerous awards, including the American Book Award in Biography of the Before Columbus Foundation in 1990 and the Clarence Holt Award in 1988, and it was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1989; the first volume. I, Too, Sing America, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987.

A native of Trinidad in the West Indies, Rampersad was born on 13 November 1941 in Port-of-Spain and is the only son of Jerome and Evelyn De Souza Rampersad; he is the youngest of...