The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a 2010 crime novel by African-American and Jewish author Walter Mosley. The novel, like much of Mosley's other work, features a black male protagonist/"hero": according to Mosley, "hardly anybody in America has written about black male heroes... There are black male protagonists and black male supporting characters, but nobody else writes about black male heroes." Although he was raised mostly non-political, he later developed strong feelings about combatting racism and anti-Semitism (which he believes is part of the former).
The novel takes place in Los Angeles, where Mosley grew up for much of his childhood. The titular character suffers from dementia and lives a reclusive life in his messy apartment until helped by a young, female family friend. The feelings expressed by the character may reflect feelings Mosley experienced during certain points in his life--the emptiness and lack of direction, for example, that he felt after working a series of odd jobs in New York and before receiving mentorship from his tutor Edna O'Brian.
In addition to his various crime novels, Mosley has written works of science fiction, a genre recalled during Ptolemy Grey's volunteering for the experimental medical program that ends up shortening his life even while restoring his mental faculties. However, the novel also reflects a real-life inspiration, as revealed in Mosley's interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross: Mosley wrote the novel while watching his mother suffer from the early stages of dementia. In the interview, Mosley says that "when you deal with a person who's experiencing dementia, you can see where they're struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they're trying to remember. ... What I saw in my mom's eyes and in some of her expressions, was her saying, 'I want to understand it; I want to understand what you're saying; I want to enter into a dialogue with you; I want things to be the way they were.' That's the crux of the novel: What would you do to have things the way they were?"
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is not the only one of Mosley's novels that is critical of the American medical system or presents it as an "antagonist" of sorts: his 2005 "Easy Rawlins" novel, Cinnamon Kiss, features Easy's daughter needing "a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time."
