Personal Life
Mosley was born in California. His mother, Ella (née Slatkin), was Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk; her ancestors had immigrated from Russia. His father, Leroy Mosley (1924-2005), was an African American from Louisiana who was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school. He had worked as a clerk in the segregated US army during the Second World War. His parents tried to marry in 1951 but, though the union was legal in California where they were living, no one would give them a marriage license.
He was an only child, and ascribes his writing imagination to "an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies". For $9.50 a week, Walter Mosley attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to more comfortably affluent, working-class west LA. Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a "black Socrates" and though his mother wasn't effusive, inspired in him the tools to write, filling his world with European classics from Dickens and Zola to Camus. He also loves Langston Hughes and Gabriel García Márquez. He was largely raised in a non-political family culture, although there were high racial conflicts flaring though L.A. at the time and he would later become more highly politicised and outspoken about racial inequalities in the US, which are a context of much of his fiction.
He went through a "long-haired hippie" phase, drifting around Santa Cruz and Europe. Mosley attended and then dropped out of Goddard College, a liberal arts college in Plainfield, Vermont and then earned a political science degree at Johnson State College. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory, he started work programming computers. He moved to New York in 1981 and met the dancer and choreographer Joy Kellman, whom he married in 1987. They separated 10 years later and were divorced in 2001. While working for Mobil Oil Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem. One of his tutors there, Edna O'Brien, became a mentor to him and encouraged him, saying: "You're Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches therein."
Mosley still resides in New York City.
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