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Interviews with the author of Invisible Man and many other works
"This superb [essay] collection enables readers of Invisible Man to appreciate the subtleties of its cultural and political commentary." —Journal of American Studies An important collection of original essays that examine how Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible Man (1952), addresses the social, cultural, political, economic, and racial contradictions of America. Commenting on the significance of Mark Twain's writings, Ralph Ellison wrote that "a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal." Ellison ...
Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison’s strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage. Starting with Ellison’s hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma and his ordeal as a student in Alabama, Rampersad documents his improbable, painstaking rise in New York to a commanding place on the literary scene. With scorching honesty but also fair and compassionate, Rampersad lays bare his subject’s troubled psychology and its impact on his art and on the people about him.This book is both the definitive biography of Ellison and a stellar model of literary biography.
A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, ...
Praise for the previous edition:Booklist/RBB "Twenty Best Bets for Student Researchers"RUSA/ALA "Outstanding Reference Source"" ... useful ... Recommended for public libraries and undergraduates."
Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. “Ralph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”
Discusses Ellison's "Invisible Man" and also comments on his nonfiction.
"Lewis and Ida Ellison settled in Oklahoma City in 1910, a few years before the birth of their first son Ralph Waldo on March 1, 1913. They had migrated west from South Carolina, like many African Americans from the deep South, in hopes of opportunity and an escape from racial violence in a new state not yet under the hold of Jim Crow. Oklahoma had only been a U.S. state for three years when they arrived. Before 1907, it was Oklahoma Territory, and before that, Indian Territory (1830s-1890), occupied and managed by some three dozen tribes native to or relocated to the region prior to the Civil War. "The Territory" had come to be a haven for famous outlaws, but for many it also represented possibility: a chance for new immigrants to find good work in an unbiased setting, like the Italians who mined coal for the Choctaw Nation; freedom from the status quo for those who felt confined by the social mores of the northeast; a chance for single women to own property; and space for new communities, such as the approximately fifty, self-governing all-black towns and settlements that dotted the pan-shaped map"--
The essays in this collection treat the whole of Ralph Ellison's body of work, including his famous novel 'Invisible Man'. The volume confronts Ellison the man of ideas, essayist and short story writer, as well as the material in his posthumously published novel 'Juneteenth'.
Skillfully interweaving quotations from Wright's writings, Rowley portrays a man who transcended the times in which he lived and sought to reconcile opposing cultures in his work. In this lively, finely crafted narrative, Wright--passionate, complex, courageous, and flawed--comes vibrantly to life. Two 8-page photo inserts.