Anatole Paul Broyard (July 16, 1920 – October 11, 1990) was an American writer, literary critic, and editor who wrote for The New York Times.
His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death.
Several years after his death, Broyard became the center of controversy when it was revealed that he had "passed" as white despite being a Louisiana Creole of mixed-race ancestry.
Anatole Paul Broyard was born on July 16, 1920, in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Black Louisiana Creole family, the son of Paul Anatole Broyard, a carpenter and construction worker, and his wife, Edna Miller, neither of whom had finished elementary school.
Their younger sister, Shirley, who eventually married Franklin Williams, an attorney and civil rights leader, had darker skin and African features.
According to his daughter, Bliss Broyard, "My mother said that when my father was growing up in Brooklyn, where his family had moved when he was six, he'd been ostracized by both white and black kids alike.
As he recounted in a 1979 column: Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel... Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity.
[9] Charlie Parker once said of Broyard, “He’s one of us, but he doesn’t want to admit he’s one of us.”[1] On the other hand, Margaret Harrell has written that she and other acquaintances were casually told that he was a writer and black before meeting him, and not in the sense of having to keep it secret.
[4] In 1961, at the age of 40, Broyard married again, to Alexandra (Sandy) Nelson, a modern dancer and younger woman of Norwegian-American ancestry.
The social critic Ernest Van den Haag, a close friend of Broyard's, said, “I do think it’s not without significance that Anatole married a blonde, and about as white as you can get.
(Gates included the profile, as a chapter titled "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," in his 1997 book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.)
[8]In 2007, Broyard's daughter, Bliss, published a memoir, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets.
[12] Given Broyard's stature in the literary world and discussions about his life after his death, numerous literary critics, such as Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, Lorrie Moore, Charles Taylor, Touré, and Brent Staples, have made comparisons between the character Coleman Silk in Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and Broyard.
[13][14][15][16][17] Some speculated that Roth had been inspired by Broyard's life, and commented on the larger issues of race and identity in American society.
He explained that he had only learned about Broyard's black ancestry and choices from the Gates New Yorker article, published months after he had already started writing the novel.