Albert L. Murray

Born May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, AL

Albert L. Murray ( May 12, 1916 – ) from Nokomis, Mobile County, is an African-American literary and jazz critic, novelist and biographer.

He attended the Tuskegee Institute and received a bachelor’s degree in 1939. He later earned an M.A. from New York University in 1948. In 1943 he entered the U.S. Air Force, from which he retired as a major in 1962.

Murray began his writing career in earnest in 1962, after he retired from the military. His first book, The Omni-Americans (1970), received critical acclaim.

Though they did not know each other at Tuskegee, Murray and Ralph Ellison became close friends shortly after Murray graduated. Their mutually influential relationship – reflected in the book Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray – informed the thinking and writing of both men from the time of the writing of Ellison's Invisible Man, through Murray's social-aesthetic works and novels, up until Ellison's death in 1994.

Murray and the American painter Romare Bearden were also close friends and influenced each other's art.

Bearden's 1971 six-panel, 18-foot collage The Block was inspired by the view from Murray's Harlem apartment.

As detailed in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s New Yorker profile "King of Cats" (April 8, 1996) and in Sanford Pinsker's article in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Murray received greater attention in the 80s and 90s due to his influence on critic Stanley Crouch and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. After detailing Murray's insightful engagement – in nonfiction and fiction – of history, politics, aesthetics, painting, music and literature, Gates concluded his profile by noting: "This is Albert Murray's century, we just live in it."

With Wynton Marsalis, Murray is the co-founder of the program and institution known as Jazz at Lincoln Center.