Anatole Broyard

Anatole Broyard (July 16, 1920- October 11, 1990) was an American literary critic for the New York Times. In addition to his reviews and columns, he published several books during his lifetime, and his most autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness and Kafka Was the Rage, A Greenwich Village Memoir were published after his death.

Interestingly, since his death Broyard's ethnicity has become a subject of discussion. Broyard was in born in New Orleans to parents who were both classified as "negro" and raised in a working-class "coloured" community. Until recent decades, the black community of Louisiana included a distinct group of light-skinned/multi-racial families of Afro-European descent who tended to marry amongst one another, as opposed to marrying darker or more mixed families. Broyard himself was reluctant to discuss his ethnic background during his most of his life. Because of this, he was often accused of being a black man "passing" as white by some who criticized the fact that he did not openly support African-American causes or identify himself as a racial minority. Others, however, contend that Broyard, who has very fair skinned, was probably of primarily European descent and therefore had no reason to declare himself black or African-American.