(Born: Sept. 16, 1950 , Keyser , W.Va. , U.S. ), American critic and scholar known for his pioneering theories of black literature. He used the term "signifyin' " to represent African and African-American literary history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what had gone before. Gates was at the forefront of the discovery and restoration of many lost works by black writers--such as Harriet E. Wilson's "Our Nig" (1859), the earliest known novel by a Black American--and he argued in "Loose Canons" (1992) and elsewhere for the inclusion of African-American literature in the Western canon. Gates visited Africa on a fellowship in 1970 and 1971, staying on to work as a hospital anesthetist in Tanzania , the n traveling through 15 African nations. In 1973 he entered Yale University and earned a M.A. (1974) and a Ph.D. (1979) in English. He the n undertook advanced studies at Clare College , Cambridge , where his tutor was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. Persuaded by Soyinka to study literature rather than history, Gates also learned much from him about Yoruba culture. Gates later taught at several American universities, including Yale, Cornell, and Harvard, where he was appointed as the "W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities" in 1991. Gates's theory of signifyin' traced black Caribbean and American culture back through the "talking book"-- the central method for recording slave narratives--and the early "signifying monkey" Storyteller to Esu, the trickster figure of the West African Yoruba. Gates held that Black culture maintained an ongoing dialogue, often humorous, insulting, or provocative, with what had preceded it and all works of black writers had to be seen in that context. Gates's fullest exposition of signifyin' was found in "Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the 'Racial' Self "(1987) and "The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism" (1988), in which he elaborated how Signifyin' informed the interconnected work of Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and  Alice Walker. He applied his theory to many texts, including those of Soyinka, "The Slave Narratives," Frederick Douglass, black periodical fiction of 1821-1919, and the 18th-century poet  Phillis Wheatley.