All students of African-American literature and history owe a debt to Nellie McKay, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., a noted scholar and author.
McKay, a former chairwoman of the department of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died on Sunday after a lengthy battle with liver cancer.
Gates, chairman of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, was co-editor with McKay on the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, released in 1997. It is widely regarded as the definitive collection of works by American black authors.