Adam Bradley (literary critic)

Early life

Bradley was born in Salt Lake City, Utah to Jane Bradley and Jim Terry. As a first-grade student in a Los Gatos, California elementary school his teacher informed his mother that her son was a nice boy, but should be held back a grade. Bradley’s mother pulled him out of school and moved back to Salt Lake City with her parents, both educators. Bradley’s grandparents home-schooled him until high school, emphasizing a liberal arts curriculum. After graduating from Olympus High School in Salt Lake City, Bradley went on to complete a BA degree in English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. As a sophomore at Lewis & Clark, Bradley began working as a research assistant for Professor John F. Callahan, a friend and soon-to-be-named literary executor of the late African-American novelist Ralph Ellison. Upon his death in 1994, Ellison left behind thousands of manuscript pages and computer files related to his long-in-progress second novel, a follow-up to his 1952 classic, Invisible Man. Working with Ellison’s unpublished manuscripts proved a formative experience for Bradley, who decided to attend graduate school to study English so that he could continue collaborating with Callahan on Ellison’s papers.

Career

In 2003 Bradley earned his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University, where he studied with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West. After a fellowship at Dartmouth College, Bradley accepted an assistant professorship at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. In 2009, he became a tenured associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2013, Bradley founded the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture (RAP Lab), “an interdisciplinary space for developing and exchanging ideas at the intersection of race and popular culture.” Among its initiatives is Hip Hop in the Classroom, which uses rap music to help middle school and high school teachers increase their students’ interest in the language arts.

Works on Hip Hop

Bradley is recognized for bringing the study of literary criticism to rap lyrics. His first book, Book of Rhymes, applies the tools of poetic analysis to the beats and rhymes of hip hop. The term “book of rhymes” is a reference to the composition notebooks rappers often use to compose and to collect their rhymes. Bradley argues that “the book of rhymes is where rap becomes poetry.” In the first part of the book, he analyzes rap’s rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay. In the second part, he looks at style, storytelling, and signifying. Among the key critical concepts Bradley introduces is the “dual rhythmic relationship,” a term that describes the collaboration of voice and beat in rap music.

Book of Rhymes was reviewed widely. The Boston Globe wrote, “Biggie had flow; Jay-Z has flow. For an English professor, Adam Bradley got some flow of his own.” While critiquing the book’s defense of hip hop culture, The New York Times called it “a triumph of jargon free scrutiny.” Writing in Library Journal, Joshua Finnell noted that “Bradley is emerging as a pioneering scholar in the study of hip-hop.” In 2013, Book of Rhymes was selected by the University of Pennsylvania as their summer reading text for first-year students, an honor previously bestowed on Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

In 2010, Bradley (along with co-editor, Andrew DuBois) published The Anthology of Rap, which was described as “an English major's hip-hop bible.” At 900 pages, the Anthology collects and organizes nearly three hundred lyrics from across hip hop’s history. The book received considerable critical attention, attracting both praise and criticism. Writing in the New York Times, Alan Light observed that “this landmark work chronicles an earth-shattering movement with deep roots.” Dan Chiasson stated in The New York Review of Books that “the Anthology of Rap is among the best books of its kind ever published.” However, some reviewers and bloggers called attention to alleged transcription errors. For instance, on the Ol’ Dirty Bastard song “Brooklyn Zoo,” The Anthology of Rap transcribes a line as “I drop science like girls be droppin babies,” whereas some critics heard “I drop science like Cosby droppin babies.” New York Magazine selected The Anthology of Rap as one of the best books of 2010, with critic Sam Anderson noting, "This thrilling (but controversial) textual monument to a thrilling (but controversial) oral tradition wrestles the genre's greatest lyricists out of the airwaves and into cold print. . . . [It] enables something wonderful: the ability to sit in perfect silence and roll around in, for example, the lush Keatsian soundplay of Jay-Z.” The Village Voice, The New England Book Festival, the San Francisco Book Festival, and the Book of the Year Awards all honored The Anthology of Rap as one of the best books of 2010.

In 2011, Bradley collaborated with the rapper and actor Common on Common’s memoir, One Day It’ll All Make Sense. The book follows Common’s life from his childhood on the South Side of Chicago to his multidimensional entertainment career today. The late author Maya Angelou called it a “magnificent memoir.” The journalist and author Touré described it as “a thoughtful and beautiful book.” It won the 2012 Street Lit Book Award for Adult Nonfiction. One Day It’ll All Make Sense went on to become a New York Times bestseller.

Works on Ralph Ellison

Bradley has published two books related to the novelist Ralph Ellison. Three Days Before the Shooting. . .: The Unfinished Second Novel, written by Ralph Ellison and edited by Bradley and John Callahan, is a collection of manuscripts from Ellison’s never-completed second novel. Ellison began writing his second novel around the time of Invisible Man’s publication in 1952. Though he released several excerpts from his novel-in-progress over the next forty years, Ellison failed to publish the long-anticipated novel during his lifetime. In 1999, Callahan released a portion of Ellison’s novel under the title of Juneteenth. At more than a thousand pages, Three Days Before the Shooting. . . constitutes the fullest version of Ellison’s uncompleted vision. Set at the dawn of the civil rights movement, the novel concerns the relationship between a black minister named Alonzo Hickman and his surrogate son of indeterminate race, Bliss, who grows up to become a racist New England senator. [Howard] Three Days Before the Shooting. . . was named one of the year’s best works of outsider fiction by NPR, one of “Oprah’s Books to Watch,” and a Best Book of 2010 by The Root. Soon after the publication of Three Days Before the Shooting. . ., Bradley published Ralph Ellison In Progress, which traces the history of Ellison’s composition of his two novels, one published to great acclaim, the other remaining unpublished until years after his death. Among the insights in the book is that Ellison was an early adopter of the personal computer as a tool of literary composition. Using an Osborne 1 and Osborne 2, marketed as among the world’s first portable computers for business, and WordStar software, Ellison amassed several thousand pages of drafts related to his second novel. Bradley speculates that though the computer undoubtedly facilitated Ellison’s productivity, it may well have inhibited his ability to complete his novel so long in progress. The African-American novelist Ishmael Reed observed that with Ralph Ellison in Progress “Adam Bradley has made literary criticism interesting again.”

Personal life

Bradley is married to Anna Spain Bradley, a professor of international law at the University of Colorado, Boulder.