He is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles where he directs the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture (RAP Lab).

[3] As a first-grade student in a Los Gatos, California elementary school his teacher informed his mother that her son was a nice boy, but should be held back a grade.

[5] After graduating from Olympus High School in Salt Lake City, Bradley went on to complete a BA degree in English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

[5] As a sophomore at Lewis & Clark, Bradley began working as a research assistant for Professor John F. Callahan, a friend and soon-to-be-named literary executor of the late African-American novelist Ralph Ellison.

Upon his death in 1994, Ellison left behind thousands of manuscript pages and computer files related to his long-in-progress second novel, a follow-up to his 1952 classic, Invisible Man.

[13] Among the key critical concepts Bradley introduces is the dual rhythmic relationship, the collaboration of voice and beat in rap music.

"[15] While critiquing the book's defense of hip hop culture, The New York Times called it "a triumph of jargon free scrutiny".

"[17] In 2013, Book of Rhymes was selected by the University of Pennsylvania as their summer reading text for first-year students, an honor previously bestowed on Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

He has an acute ear, dazzling command of seemingly the entire history of pop and a pleasingly wide range of taste, drawing on examples from Gershwin to Guns 'n' Roses to make his points.

Set at the dawn of the civil rights movement, the novel concerns the relationship between a black minister named Alonzo Hickman and his surrogate son of indeterminate race, Bliss, who grows up to become a racist New England senator.

[6] The African-American novelist Ishmael Reed observed that with Ralph Ellison in Progress "Adam Bradley has made literary criticism interesting again.