Larry D. Moore · CC BY 4.0

Created Easy Rawlins, the hardboiled private investigator whose historical mysteries — set in Watts and moving through decades of Los Angeles's Black history — built Walter Mosley's reputation as one of crime fiction's most distinctive voices. In 2020 he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, becoming the first Black man to receive the honor, a recognition of a body of work that used genre fiction to carry serious historical weight rather than treating it as a lesser form.