Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (Skip)

1950 - Born on the 16th of September in Keyser, West Virginia, U.S.

1968 - Gates graduated as valedictorian of his high school class and attended a local junior college before enrolling at Yale University.

1970 - Receiving two fellowships, he took a leave of absence from Yale to visit Africa, working as an anesthetist in a hospital in Tanzania and then traveling through other African nations.

1973 - He received a bachelor's degree in history.

         - He entered Clare College at the University of Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka.

1979 - Receiving his doctoral degree in English language and literature, Gates taught literature and African American studies at Yale University, Cornell University, Duke University, and Harvard University.

1980 - Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale.

1984 - The Black Literature and Literary Theory.

1991 - He was appointed W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities.

         - Bearing Witness: Selections from African American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century.

1997 - The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.