Anatole Broyard - Biography

Biography

Broyard was born in New Orleans into a mixed-race Louisiana Creole family, the son of Paul Anatole Broyard, a carpenter and construction worker, and his wife, Edna Miller, neither of whom finished elementary school. Broyard was descended from pre-Civil War free people of color. The first Broyard in Louisiana was a French colonist in the mid-eighteenth century. Broyard was the second of three children; he and his sister Lorraine, two years older, were light skinned with features that were more European. Their younger sister Shirley, who eventually married the lawyer and civil rights leader Franklin Williams, was darker and showed more of her African ancestry.

When Broyard was a young child, his family joined the Great Migration during the Great Depression, moving from New Orleans to New York City, to go where his father thought there were more work opportunities. They lived in a working-class and racially diverse community in Brooklyn. Having grown up in the French Quarter's Creole community, Broyard felt he had little in common with the blacks of Brooklyn. He saw his parents "pass" as white to get work, as his father found the carpenters' union racially discriminatory. By high school, the younger Broyard had become interested in artistic and cultural life; his sister Shirley said he was unique in the family with these interests.

As the writer and editor Brent Staples wrote in 2003, "Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer -- and not just a 'Negro writer' consigned to the back of the literary bus." The historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote: "In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy."

Broyard had some stories accepted for publication in the 1940s. He began studying at Brooklyn College before the US entered World War II. When he enlisted in the Army, the armed services were segregated; Broyard was accepted as white, went to officers' school, and was promoted to captain.

After the war, he continued with his white identity. Staples noted:

"Those who had escaped the penalties of blackness in the military were often unwilling to go back to second-class citizenship after the war. One demographer estimated that more that 150,000 black people sailed away permanently into whiteness during the 1940's alone, marrying white spouses and most likely cutting off their black families."

Broyard used the GI Bill to study at the New School for Social Research and settled in Greenwich Village, where he became part of its bohemian artistic and literary life. With money saved during the war, Broyard owned a bookstore for a time. As he described 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."

He did not identify with or champion black political causes. Because of his artistic ambition, in some circumstances he never acknowledged that he was part black. 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. That he was black was well known in the Greenwich Village literary community from the early 1960s.

During the 1940s, Broyard published stories in Modern Writing, Discovery, and New World Writing, three leading pocket-book format "little magazines". He also contributed articles and essays to Partisan Review, Commentary, Neurotica, and New Directions Publishing. Stories of his were included in two anthologies of fiction widely associated with the Beat writers, but Broyard did not identify with them.

He was often said to be working on a novel, but never published one. After the 1950s, Broyard taught creative writing at The New School, New York University, and Columbia University, in addition to his regular book reviewing. For nearly fifteen years, Broyard wrote daily book reviews for the New York Times. The editor John Leonard was quoted as saying, "A good book review is an act of seduction, and when he did it there was no one better."

In the late 1970s, Broyard started publishing brief personal essays in the Times, which many people considered among his best work. These were collected in Men, Women and Anti-Climaxes, published in 1980. In 1984 Broyard was given a column in the Book Review, for which he also worked as an editor. He was among those considered "gatekeepers" in the literary world.