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Books by Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man: A Novel
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The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison /
Juneteenth: A Novel /
Shadow and Act /
Flying Home and Others Stories
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Going to The Territory /
Trading Twelves; The Selected Letters of Ralph
Ellison and Albert Murray
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Arnold Rampersad.
Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007)
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Ralph Waldo Ellison
Biographical Sketch (1914-1968)
When Ralph Ellison’s impassioned,
compelling novel
Invisible Man was published in 1952, it
won the National Book Award for fiction. Although Ellison
himself was modest in his estimate of the novel’s durability,
the book has shown every indication that it is on its way to
becoming an American classic. In a poll of 200 writers, editors,
and critics conducted by the New York Herald Tribune’s Book
Week magazine in 1965, Invisible Man was voted the
most distinguished novel published in the twenty years since
1945.
In Invisible Man Ellison constructed,
from the fabric of his own background as a Negro, a nightmarish
story of the brutal experience endured by a young American black
man and their effect on his once naively idealistic psyche.
Despite its theme, the book transcends the bounds of a
traditional Negro novel. “This is not another journey to the
end of the night,” Wright Morris once wrote of Invisible
Man. “With this book the author maps a course from the
underground world into the light. The Invisible Man
belongs on the shelf with the classical efforts man has made to
chart the river Lethe from its mouth to its source.” Ellison
has also published Shadow and Act (1964)
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma on March 1, 1914 to Lewis Alfred and Ida
(Millsap) Ellison. His father, a construction worker and
tradesman, died when Ellison was three, and his mother supported
herself and her son by working as a domestic. From an early age
Ellison was interested in music and books, and his mother
brought home for him from the households where she labored
discarded phonograph records and magazines. Growing up in
Oklahoma City, Ellison knew Hot Lips page, the jazz musician,
and he was a friend . . . of Jimmy Rushing, the blues singer. In
high school, he played trumpet in the band.
Ellison began reading Hemingway in
adolescence, and later he became interested in the poetry of T.S.
Eliot. “At first I was puzzled when I began to read Ernest
Hemingway . . . as to just why his stories could move me but I
couldn’t reduce them to a logical system. . . .” Ellison
told Mike McGrady of Newsday (October 28, 1967). “Then
I began to look at my own life through the lives of fictional
characters. When I read Stendhal, I would search within the
Negro communities in which I grew up. I began, in other words,
quite early to connect the worlds projected in literature and
poetry and drama and novels with the life in which I found
myself.”
Ellison studied music at Tuskegee Institute
in Tuskegee, Alabama for three years, beginning in 1933. In 1936
he went to New York City Federal Writers Project, and met
Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. The latter encouraged him to
write and introduced him to the novels of Joseph Conrad, the
prefaces of Henry James, and the letters of Dostoevsky. Wright
also, according to John Corry, who interviewed Ellison for the
New York Times (November 20, 1966), taught Ellison that,
in Corry’s words, “writing must be done consciously.” In
1939 Ellison began contributing short stories, book reviews, and
essays to the New Masses, the Antioch Review, and
other publications. For a brief time he edited the Negro
Quarterly. During World War II Ellison served with the
United States Merchant Marine. After the war a Rosenwald
fellowship enabled him to concentrate on writing Invisible
Man, which was published by Random House in 1952.
The novel is the story of an idealistic young
Negro and the frustrating, humiliating, and often shocking
experiences, in the South and in Harlem, that disillusion him.
Hurt and bewildered, he retreats into “invisibility,” holing
himself up in an unused Harlem basement and hibernating there
until, he hopes, he will be able to reemerge into society with
an alternative view of his, and the Negro people’s, identity.
The story is told by the hero in surrealistic flashbacks in
which wry humor provides the only relief from grim despair,
grotesque brutality, and savage violence.
Upon its publication, Invisible Man
was greeted on all sides with praise for the poetic intensity of
the narrative and only an occasional faulting of Ellison for
overwriting and fuzzy symbolism. “Mr. Ellison obviously knows
what he is talking about,” Orville Prescott wrote in the New
York Times (April 16, 1952), “and it is not pleasant. .
. . Invisible Man is tough, brutal, and sensational. It
is uneven in quality. But it blazes with authentic talent.”
George Mayberry in the New Republic
(April 21, 1952) noted that the book was “shorn of the racial
and political clichés that have encumbered the ‘Negro
novel’,” and in a similar vein H.C. Webster in the Saturday
Review (April 12, 1952) observed that “Invisible Man is
not a great Negro novel. It is a work of art any contemporary
writer could point to with pride.” Other critics characterized
the novel as “dynamic” and “remarkably vivid and
compelling.”
When Invisible Man was awarded the
National Book award for fiction in January 1953 the judges for
the award made the following statement: “In Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison shows us how invisible we all are to each other.
With a positive exuberance of narrative gifts, he has broken
away from the conventions and patterns of the tight
‘well-made’ novel. Mr. Ellison has had succeeded with
the.” In accepting the award, Ellison expressed the fear that
the judges were “rewarding my efforts rather than my not quite
fully achieved attempt at a major novel,” and years later, in
an interview for the Paris Review (Number 8), the author
again expressed the fear that the novel was “not an important
one,” explaining: “I failed of eloquence.”
In 1965, thirteen years after the publication
of Invisible Man, when the New York Herald Tribune’s
Book Week poll singled out Ellison’s book as the most
distinguished novel published between 1945 and 1965, W.E. Dupree
wrote in Book Week (September 26, 1965): “Ellison was a
man of comparative youth and small literary experiences when he
embarked on the writing of Invisible Man. . . . yet the
book he worked at for years and finally brought out in 1952
could scarcely have been more ambitious if he had been writing
novels for half a lifetime. Invisible man was a veritable Moby
Dick of the racial crisis, with the terrors and exaltations
of Negro-White existence replacing those of a whaling voyage,
and the hero’s search for a real identity and human function
(‘a place in history,’ as he puts it) supplanting the
pursuit of the white whale.”
Shadow and Act (Random house, 19640,
Ellison’s second book, is a collection of twenty essays, most
of them personal pieces in which he reflects on his life and his
art, and two interviews. In his introduction to the book Ellison
said of the short pieces: “The very least I can say about
their value is that they performed the grateful function of
making it unnecessary to clutter up my fiction with half-formed
or outrageously wrong-headed ideas. At best they are in
embodiment of a conscious attempt to confront, to peer into the
shadow of my past and to remind myself of the complex resources
for imaginative creation which are my heritage.”
He went on to explain: “Good fiction is
made of that which is real, and reality ifs difficult to come
by. So much of it depends upon the individual’s willingness to
discover his true self, upon his defining himself . . . against
his background.” He implied that what enabled him to rise
above racial bitterness was his dedication to his art: “When I
say that the novelist is created by the novel, I mean to remind
you that fictional techniques are not a mere set of objective
tools, but something more intimate: a way of feeling, of seeing,
and of expressing one’s sense of life. And the process of
acquiring technique is a process of modifying one’s responses,
of learning to see and feel, to hear and observe, to evoke and
evaluate . . . of learning to conceive of human values in the
ways which have been established by the great writers who have
developed and extended the art.”
“This collection of essays, interviews, and
reviews, diverse though its impact necessarily is, has a
curiously original ring at this moment,” Philip Larkin wrote
in reviewing Shadow and Act in the Manchester Guardian
(January 13, 1967). “It is the chippings and shavings from the
work of a writer who happens—and here the cliché is really
applicable—to be an American Negro. The originality lies in
the fact that although he recognizes the singular role his race
has at present (‘I propose that we view the whole of American
life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who,
lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene
upon which and within which the action unfolds’) he is not
really interested in his Negro characteristics compared with his
heritage as a man and an artist. Ellison was freed not by the
Negro Freedom Movement but by Marx, Freud, T.S. Eliot, Pound,
Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway.”
“I am a novelist, not an activist,”
Ellison told John Corry in the New York Yimes interview. “But
I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my
lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement.
As an individual, I am primarily responsible for the health of
American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to
make sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about
his Negroness is to fall into a trap.
Ellison is represented in the following
collections: Cross Section (Fischer, 1944), edited by E.
Seaver; Best Short Stories of World War II (Viking,
1957), edited by Charles A. Fenton; I Have Seen War (Hill
and Wang, 1960), edited by Dorothy Sterling; The Living Novel
(MacMillan, 1957), edited by Granville Hicks; A New
Southern Harvest (Bantam, 1957), edited by Robert Penn
Warren and Robert Erskine; The Angry Black (Lancer,
1962), edited by John A. Williams; and Soon One Morning
(Knopf, 1963), edited by Herbert Hill. Among the publications to
which he has contributed are Tomorrow, the Reporter,
the Noble Savage, the Quarterly Review of Literature,
the Partisan Review, the Saturday Review, Horizon,
and the book review section of the New York Herald Tribune.
Ellison has been visiting professor of
writing at Yale University since 1964. he was an instructor in
Russian and American literature at Bard College from 1958 to
1961, Alexander White Visiting Professor at the University of
Chicago in 1961, and visiting professor of writing at Rutgers
University from 1962 to 1964. Other institutions at which he has
lectured include the Library of Congress, the Salzburg (Austria)
seminar, the University of California, New York University,
Bennington College, Fisk University, Princeton University,
Columbia University, and Antioch College.
Ralph Ellison and fanny McConnell were
married in July 1946. They live in an apparent on Riverside
Drive in the Washington heights section of Manhattan with their
dog, Tucka. “Ellison likes the things of the earth,” John
Corry wrote in his New York Times article, “and he
worries about the fungus on the African violets that he raises
in his study. He likes to fish and he likes to bird-watch on
Riverside Drive. . . .” Ellison leads a quiet life, according
to Corry. “He rises by 7, pads out to the hallway to pick up
the paper and, if his wife, fanny, is not up, he makes coffee.
Then he reads the paper or watches the news on television. By 9
he is at his desk.”
Ellison, who works slowly and patiently, has
been working on a second novel for the past decade. His hobbies
are color photography, tinkering with his hi-fi equipment, and
playing the recorder. He drives his own car largely to avoid the
inconvenience of being snubbed by white cab drivers. But he told
John Corry that he did not allow instances of prejudice and
discrimination to disturb him. “I consider it part of the
environment. . . ,” he said. “I don’t allow anonymous
people to give me a sense of my worth.”
Source:
Current Biography
1968
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update 11 August 2008 |
