Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr., is widely regarded as the leading scholar of African American literature in the world today. As director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, he has discovered historical texts and developed theoretical analyses that not only have informed the study of black culture but also have served to influence its development. An April 1998 article in Boston Magazine scandalously headlined a profile of the professor as "Head Negro in Charge." More recently, he made headlines in the summer of 2009 after being improperly arrested in his own home by Cambridge, Mass., police, effecting a so-called "beer summit" with him and the offending officer at the White House, hosted by President Barack Obama. The following year, he donated the handcuffs with which officers shackled him on his front porch to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Such colorful episodes accord with the creativity of his scholarship, and that is what is on display in his latest book.
