[close] Walter Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is a prominent American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction.

Mosley has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; it is perhaps his most popular work.

Mosley has written over 20 books in a variety of categories, including non-mystery fiction, afrofuturist science fiction and non-fiction politics, and has been translated into 21 languages. Mosley's fame increased in 1992 when then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favorite authors. Two of his books have been made into films or television specials; his first published book, Devil in a Blue Dress, became a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington.

Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including the Anisfield Wolf Award, an honor given to works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America. He was a finalist for the NAACP Award in Fiction and won the 1996 Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Literary Award for RL's Dream. He was an O. Henry Award winner in 1996 (for a Socrates Fortlow story). In 2005 the Sundance Institute gave him a "Risktaker Award" for both his creative and activist efforts. In 2006 he was the first recipient of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award for his young adult novel 47.

Mosley holds an honorary doctorate from the City College of New York, is on the Board of Trustees for Goddard College, and has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards.

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