Gates discovered The Bondwoman's Narrative which is the first known novel written by an African American woman who had been a slave.  He along with Anthony Anthony Appiah edited Africana; The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience.

He is also general editor of the The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, co-editor of Transition magazine, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of essays, reviews and profiles in other magazines, scholarly periodicals and newspapers.

Honors granted to him include the Zora Neale Hurston Society Award for Cultural Scholarship, the Norman Rabb Award of the American Jewish Committee, the George Polk Award for Social Commentary and the Tikkun National Ethics Award. He has been a Mellon Fellow at Cambridge and the National Humanities Center, a Ford Foundation National Fellow and a MacArthur Prize Fellow.

Gates is also a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Finding Oprah's Roots: Building an African-American Family Tree
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Written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

ISBN: 0307382389
Pub. Date: February 06, 2007
Format: Hardcover, 192pp
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Finding Oprah's Roots will not only endow readers with a new appreciation for the key contributions made by history’s unsung but also equip them with the tools to connect to pivotal figures in their own past. A roadmap through the intricacies of public documents and online databases, the book also highlights genetic testing resources that can make it possible to know one’s distant tribal roots in Africa.

For Oprah, the path back to the past was emotion-filled and profoundly illuminating, connecting the narrative of her family to the larger American narrative and “anchoring” her in a way not previously possible. For the reader, Finding Oprah’s Roots offers the possibility of an equally rewarding experience.

Renowned scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. DuBois professor of the Humanities and chair of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, takes Alex Haley’s Roots saga to a whole new level. Using genealogy and DNA science, Dr. Gates tells the personal stories of eight accomplished African Americans, tracing their roots through American history and back to Africa. Participants include Dr. Ben Carson, Whoopi Goldberg, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Dr. Mae Jemison, Quincy Jones, Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Chris Tucker and Oprah Winfrey.

America behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans
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ISBN: 0446532738
Format: Hardcover, 464pp
Pub. Date: January 2004
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated

"Henry Louis Gates, Jr., examines the surprising social and economic journey African Americans have made. Using the interviews he conducted for his PBS series, Professor Gates portrays a community united by shared memory and a strong, vibrant culture, yet divided by wealth and lack of opportunity - a people still struggling to ensure true equality for all." Professor Gates traveled across the country interviewing forty-four famous and not-so-famous individuals from parts of the African-American community - the "Black Elite," "The New South," "Chicago's South Side," and "Black Hollywood." In their own words, each discusses what it means to be African American in the twenty-first century: from Maya Angelou and Morgan Freeman's reflections on "returning home" to the South...to convict "Eric Edwards" telling us how his peers find self-sufficiency and prove their adulthood...from an interracial couple describing how they cope with the remnants of racism in Birmingham to a single mother's insights into how life on Chicago's newly renovated South Side still presents its own particular obstacles and dangers.

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An unprecedented historical and literary event, this tale written in the 1850s is the only known novel by a female African American slave, and quite possibly the first novel written by a black woman anywhere.  A work recently uncovered by renowned scholar Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is a stirring, page-turning story of "passing" and the adventures of a young slave as she makes her way to freedom.

When Professor Gates saw that modest listing in an auction catalogue for African American artifacts, he immediately knew he could be on the verge of a major discovery. After exhaustively researching the hand-written manuscript's authenticity, he found that his instincts were right. He had purchased a genuine autobiographical novel by a female slave who called herself — and her story's main character — Hannah Crafts.

Presented here unaltered and under its author's original title, The Bondwoman's Narrative tells of a self-educated young house slave who knows her life is limited by the brutalities of her society, but never suspects that the freedom of her plantation's beautiful new mistress is also at risk...or that a devastating secret will force them both to flee from slave hunters with another powerful, determined enemy at their heels. Together with Professor Gates' brilliant introduction — which includes the story of his search for the real Hannah Crafts, the biographical facts that laid the groundwork for her novel, and a fascinating look at other slave narratives of the time — The Bondwoman's Narrative offers a unique and unforgettable reading experience. In it, a voice that has never been heard rings out, and an undiscovered story at the heart of the American experience is finally told.

Read more about this incredible volume

Inspired by the dream of the late African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and assisted by an eminent advisory board led by Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Harvard professors Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have created the first scholarly encyclopedia that takes as its scope the entire history of Africa and the African Diaspora.

A landmark in reference publishing, Africana is an incomparable one-volume encyclopedia of the black world - a vital resource for families, students, and educators everywhere.. "With entries ranging from "affirmative action" to "zydeco," Africana includes articles on the history of each African nation and every major cultural, religious, and political movement in Africa and the New World. Here you will find entries on the most prominent ethnic groups in Africa and the lives of every African and African American Nobel Laureate as well as each member of the U. S. Congressional Black Caucus. In more than three thousand articles Africana brings the entire black world into sharp focus.

Norton Anthology of African American Literature Book & CD
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Henry Louis Gates, Nellie Y. McKay (Editor)

ISBN: 0393959082
Format: Paperback, 2665pp
Pub. Date: December 1997
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

Read more about the editors

This landmark anthology includes the work of 120 writers over two centuries, from the earliest known work by an African American, Lucy Terry's poem "Bars Fight, " to the fiction of the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison and the poems of the U.S. Poet Laureate, Rita Dove.

The Future of the Race
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by Dr. Cornel West & Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

ISBN: 0679763783
Format: Paperback, 224pp
Pub. Date: December 1996
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

In a ground-breaking collaboration, and taking the great W. E. B. Du Bois as their model, two of our foremost African-American intellectuals address the dreams, fears, aspirations, and responsibilities of the black community - especially the black elite - on the eve of the twenty-first century. In 1903, the influential historian, editor, and co-founder of the NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois, published his now famous essay "The Talented Tenth." "The Negro race," it began, "like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." For the young post-Civil Rights era group of leaders, of which Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West have become such a significant part, "The Talented Tenth" was held up as a model for the social, political, and ethical roles of the new "crossover" generation. Du Bois's belief in an educated class dedicated to reform became their inspiration and their credo. Now, nearly a century after Du Bois set forth the role of the educated black American, Gates and West explore this pivotal aspect of his intellectual legacy - and, in so doing, they not only re-examine Du Bois's ideas on leadership but also respond to the challenges of the present. The problems are clear and urgent. Since the day Martin Luther King, Jr., died, the black middle class has quadrupled. Yet, simultaneously, the size of the black underclass has disproportionately and tragically skyrocketed.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage (February 3, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679776664

What does it mean to be black and male in 20th-century America? The notion of the unitary "black man" is as illusory as the creature conjured up by Wallace Stevens in his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", says Gates. With these eight essays--most of which appeared originally in "The New Yorker"--the chair of Harvard's Afro-American Studies department takes a close look at some of the most extraordinary figures of our time.

Colored People: a Memoir
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Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Vintage (April 11, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 067973919X

From Publisher's Weekly:
In a warm, gracefully written, moving autobiographical reminiscence, Gates, chairman of Harvard's Afro-American Studies department, recalls growing up in the 1950s and '60s in Piedmont, W.Va., an immigrant working-class town where the only work available to blacks at the local paper mill was loading trucks. Devastated at age 12 by the onset of his mother's depressive disorder, Gates joined a Baptist church and desperately pursued a ``restrictive fundamentalism.'' While avidly embracing ``black power'' in the mid-1960s, he yearned for approval from his father, who was ``hard on colored people.'' This engrossing narrative of Gates's intellectual, political, sexual and emotional awakening is studded with memorable incidents such as his discovery that his mother, years before he was born in 1950, led a pioneering civil rights march. 40,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB alternates. (May)

Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars
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Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 20, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195083504

From David Castronovo, The Economist:
David Castronovo, The Economist:
{These essays} attempt to make a case for black studies that is based on the author's version of black cultural nationalism. In this it fails. As another black academic, Shelby Steele, has pointed out, there is no good reason to set apart for study works by or about blacks as long as they are not excluded from the regular curriculum. To do so is to reimpose segregation in higher education. The very idea of black studies implies jobs reserved for blacks. Thus black cultural nationalism creates a special status for Mr Gates and other black academics sharing his belief that, for instance, the formal complexityof 'black slave narratives' have been highly underrated on account of prejudice. Those who disagree tend to be dismissed as ignorant or racist or both.
Copyright 1983 The H.W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of American Literary Criticism
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Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (December 14, 1989)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 019506075X

Eclectic, exciting, convincing, provocative, challenging even when he's not altogether convincing, Mr. Gates gives black literature room to breathe, invents interpretive frameworks that enable us to experience black writing rather than label it in terms of theme or ideology. From this perspective his bookis a generous long-awaited gift. . . . One goal of Mr. Gates's book is to illuminate the power of black vernacular tradition, its consciousness of itself at extremely complex, sophisticated levels. Is it necessary or appropriate that the language of that book be foreign to the majority of the tradition's carriers? What's being lost and gained? Maybe the best news about 'The Signifying Monkey' is its willingness to struggle with such issues. Like great novels that force us to view the world differently, Mr. Gates's compelling study suggests new ways of seeing. —John Wideman, The New York Times Book Review:

Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self
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Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 30, 1989)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195060741

For over two centuries, critics and the black community have tended to approach African-American literature as simply one more front in the important war against racism, valuing slave narratives and twentieth-century works alike, primarily for their political impact. In this volume, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a leading scholar in African-American studies, attacks the notion of African-American literature as a kind of social realism. Insisting, instead, that critics focus on the most repressed element of African-American criticism--the language of the text--Gates advocates the use of a close, methodical analysis of language, made possible by modern literary theory. Throughout his study, Gates incorporates the theoretical insights of critics such as Bakhtin, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Bloom, as he examines the modes of representation that define black art and analyzes the unspoken assumptions made in judging this literature since its inception. Ranging from the eighteenth-century poet, Phillis Wheatley, to modern writers, Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker, Gates seeks to redefine literary criticism itself, moving away from a Eurocentric notion of a hierarchical canon--mostly white, Western, and male--to foster a truly comparative and pluralistic notion of literature.

 

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