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Anatole Broyard (July 16, 1920 - October 11, 1990) was an American literary critic for The New York Times . He was admired as a writer of great wit and elegance. 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. Since his death, Broyard's ethnicity has become a subject of much discussion. Broyard was born in New Orleans to mixed-race parents who were both classified as "colored", and he was later raised in a working-class and mixed-race community in Brooklyn, New York. Until recent decades, the black community of Louisiana included a distinct group of light-skinned/multiracial (Creole) families of Afro-European descent who tended to intermarry, as opposed to marrying into darker or more heavily "African" families. Broyard was a member of this group, but he was reluctant to discuss his history publicly during his professional 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 publicly identify himself as black. It is, however, clear that Broyard did discuss his ethnicity with a variety of friends, who were well aware of it, and that the fact that he was part-black was well-known in the literary community of New York from the early 1950's. In 1961, Broyard married Alexandra (Sandy) Nelson, a white woman of Norwegian ancestry, who knew of his background. They had two children, Todd, born in 1964, and Bliss Broyard, born in 1966. (Broyard had previously been married to Aida Sanchez, a Puerto Rican, by whom he had had a daughter, but the couple divorced after Broyard returned from military service in World War II.) In 1997, the scholar Henry Louis Gates discussed his view of how Broyard had concealed his African-American ancestry in an essay in his book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, developed from an article in The New Yorker entitled "The Passing of Anatole Broyard." In 2007, Broyard's daughter Bliss published a memoir, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets, in which she described the moment, shortly before her father's death, when she and her brother first learned their family history. Later researching this history, Ms. Broyard discovered that her father's ancestry was, in fact, more white than black and that a number of family members, most notably but not only her father, had chosen to "pass," owing both to prevailing racial attitudes between the 1920's and the 1990's and their own views that mixed-race people should be entitled to shape their own identities. Broyard and his ethnic background are said to have been to have been the inspiration for the character Coleman Silk in Philip Roth's acclaimed novel The Human Stain .
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