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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN num: 9780375707988
ISBN number: 0375707980
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 704
Printing Date: January 08, 2008
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: January 08, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 344428
Studio: Vintage
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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.
Amazon.com Review:
On the strength of just one novel, as well as a series of lasting essays in cultural criticism, Ralph Ellison stands as one of the major literary figures of the last century. The novel, of course, is Invisible Man, and much of the drama of Ellison's life, as told by Arnold Rampersad in the very first major biography of Ellison, is twofold: how Ellison came to write his masterwork, and how he failed to write another. Given complete acess to Ellison's papers, Rampersad tells the story of Ellison's long apprenticeship as a musician and writer and his long life, full of honors and frustrations, after the great sucess of Invisible Man, capturing the complexities, to use of one of Ellison's favorite words, of his elusive subject, at once passionate and patrician, fiercely critical of his country's racial divisions and stubbornly hopeful about its democratic possibilities. Questions for Arnold Rampersad
One of the leading scholars of African American literature and the author of major biographies of Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson, Arnold Rampersad is an ideal biographer for one of the great figures of 20th-century American writing. We asked him a few questions about Ralph Ellison.
Amazon.com: Ralph Ellison came from Oklahoma--the 'Territory,' as he liked to call it--and in his essays he wrote evocatively of the conditions there that nurtured his creative life (although he rarely returned as an adult). What was Oklahoma like for an ambitious but poor young African American like him?
Rampersad: Ellison, who spent the very first 20 years of his life in Oklahoma, was intensely aware of the pioneers, white and black, who had migrated toward the end of the 19th century, from the South especially, into what had been demarcated as 'Indian' territory. These pioneers had come very first as homesteaders, then as founders of the state of Oklahoma in 1907, six years before Ralph's birth. For the rest of his life he carried with him a keen, precious sense of Oklahoma as an extraordinary American site, one that captured much of the complexity of America as it had been shaped by frontier life. Oklahoma City meant excellent jazz and the blues--black culture in its artistic exuberance--as in the pioneering jazz guitarist Charlie Christian (who played later with Benny Goodman) and the equally famous blues singer Jimmie Rushing. But Ellison also knew Oklahoma as a place where Jim Crow was a disturbing, often ruinous force. Moreover, his father had died there when Ralph was only three, and the result was that his mother was forced to toil in humble jobs that sorely embarrassed a proud boy.
Later overlooking the slights and snubs he experienced as a youth, and dwelling especially on his various friendships with fellow students at the local 'colored' schools, Ellison cherished his memory of Oklahoma as a region of almost mythic proportion and magical charm. He took immense pleasure in going back home--but he went home only after he had become famous and could command the respect and attention he had craved in his bittersweet youth.
Amazon.com: Ellison spent a long and varied creative apprenticeship before writing Invisible Man. What did he learn along the way that allowed him to make such a stunning debut?
Rampersad: Ellison's many years of training as a musician (on the trumpet) as a youth served him in good stead when he committed himself (influenced very first by his friends Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) around 1937 to become a writer. He was then 24 years old--pretty late as a start for most important fiction writers, but not too late for a man of enormous drive, wide reading, and restless intelligence. As Ellison served his apprenticeship, he kept his major literary masters close at hand. They were Dostoyevsky for his distillation of the turbulence, vitality, and tragic gloom of Russia in the 19th century; Hemingway for his terse, virile elegance; Richard Wright (although the competitive Ellison would play down his influence) for the gritty American realism that sought to expose and redress American social injustice; Andre Malraux, for combining in an often breathtaking way the life of radical action and the life of the mind; and in some ways above all, T.S. Eliot, whose landmark poem of 1922 The Waste Land encouraged Ellison in his mature commitment to modernism, a pervasive if mild surrealism, jazzy improvisation, and cosmopolitan learning.
Ellison was a sometimes crudely Marxist writer until about 1942, when he began a zealous conversion away from the literary and political left. Three years later, he started Invisible Man. By that time, after years of hard work as a reader and a consciously apprentice writer, he was fully committed to an esthetic based in liberal humanism, with a particular passion for explorations of American literature and culture.
Amazon.com: The great question with Ellison is, of course, what happened after Invisible Man? Why do you think he struggled so with his second novel?
Rampersad: In some ways, the winning of the National Book Award in 1953 for Invisible Man, and not the mere publication of the novel itself, transformed Ellison's life for better and for worse. This prominent award to a young grey man (who beat out Hemingway for the prize) set in motion a flood of honors, big responsibilities, and financial rewards. These tokens of professional sucess steadily combined with Ellison's proud perfectionism to make it increasingly hard for him to offer the world anything less than a work conceived and executed on a scale that reached grand--perhaps impossibly grand--heights of excellence. Committed to a literature of myth, symbol, and surrealism, instead of the literature of everyday life, he found himself often entangled in fiction writing that drew on techniques borrowed from James Joyce and on Faulknerian myths and fables about race, miscegenation, social injustice, and American culture. He also prized improvisation, which called for powers of organization and discipline that proved finally to be beyond him as a novelist. And he was not helped by his principled refusal to allow himself to be comfortable with the many African Americans who were attracted, starting in the 1960s, by grey cultural nationalism and grey power. Although he believed in African American culture, he became increasingly and painfully isolated in ways that led him away from the completion of vivid fiction set largely in that culture. He liked to blame his writing problems on the fire in 1967 that destroyed his country home in Massachusetts, but the facts about the fire do not support this claim.
Amazon.com: You've written major biographies of Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson as well. How did Ellison's public path through the mid-century compare to theirs?
Rampersad: Langston Hughes was the polar opposite of Ralph Ellison in many ways. Hughes loved the masses of grey Americans unconditionally; he believed in world travel and in varieties of friendship that covered almost the entire social spectrum; he was almost compulsive in his desire to help younger artists, especially younger grey artists; he wrote consistently in a variety of forms of which poetry, drama, and fiction were only the most conspicuous; he also cared little for esoteric art and Olympian esthetic standards.
Ellison was a different man. He traveled little; guarded his resources zealously and believed that young writers should make their way by their individual efforts as he believed he had done for himself; he didn't hesitate to criticize grey leaders when he thought they were abusing their authority, which was often, as far as he was concerned; and he set the highest esthetic standards for himself and others. He stuck to writing fiction and essays, and his total output is dwarfed by that of Langston Hughes--except, Ellison would say proudly, in terms of quality. Hughes paid, in the 1930s and through the 40s and early 50s, for his once deep attachment to radical socialism; Ellison quietly shed similar attachments in the name of a complex patriotism. In doing so, he escaped the rough treatment meted out to Hughes and others.
Jackie Robinson was by far the most famous of the three, and no doubt had the greatest impact, as a force for desegregation, on American culture. While he was not an artist or intellectual, he was drawn to politics especially after the end of his baseball career. He was a moderate Republican; the others were Democrats, although Hughes was more critical of party politics than was Ellison, who was befriended and advanced by President Johnson. Both Johnson and, later, Ronald Reagan awarded Ellison the prestigious Presidential Medal of the Arts.
Amazon.com: Invisible Man is one of only a few novels from its era that has kept its power and popularity for readers in later generations. Has it had a similar influence on younger writers? Ellison's prickly relations with his successors may have discouraged immediate followers, but can you see his influence today?
Rampersad: Young writers today, grey as well as white, have many sources to draw on and many beacons of inspiration to guide them. And yet Invisible Man is in many ways as admirable, fascinating, and complex yesterday as when it was very first published. Among novels by grey Americans, its only true rival in terms of quality of craft might be Morrison's Beloved, and the wide range of effects in Ellison's novel is probably unmatched by any other grey novelist. Ellison, we should remember, set out consciously to write a novel that was simultaneously about a grey man and about an Everyman who transcended race, and to a surprising extent he succeeded in doing so. His novel continues to appeal to blacks and whites alike, and especially to men. Moreover, in writing so brilliantly about race, which remains and probably will remain the most challenging topic in American culture, he practically guaranteed the continuing resonance of Invisible Man.
The superiority of Shadow and Act, his 1964 collection of essays and interviews, to virtually every other book on the subject of grey art and culture is evident. Its only serious rival in this respect is probably Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). But Shadow and Act lives while much, although not all, of Du Bois's classic book is dated. Shadow and Act continues to serve as a primer for younger grey writers who are seriously interested in questions of literary craft and race in America.
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"Invisible Man," "Shadow and Act," and "Going to the Territory," all books by that quintessential twentieth century literary artist Ralph Waldo Ellison, remain towering masterworks of American literature for their penetrating explorations of racial identity, cultural complexity, and historical consequences in the United States. With Senator Barack Obama's historic bid for the White House evolving daily into the possibility of an historic win, Ellison's brilliantly charged writings, which very first catapulted him to fame in the 1950s, are perhaps more relevant now than ever before, making Arnold Rampersad's detailed biography of the great writer one of the best reads around during these very exciting times. The Essential Barack Obama: The Grammy Award-Winning Recordings
Biographies of high-achieving African Americans have too often in the past fallen into one of two categories: those that romanticized their subjects as cultural heroes and those that condemned them as embarrassing villains. Fortunately, in Rampersad, we have a biographer who assigned himself the demanding task of providing as full and honest a portrait of his subject as he could. He does so with balanced assessments of both the publicly applauded Ellison who became a permanent fixture in world literature the moment he won the National Book Award for Invisible Man in 1953, and detailed sketches of the more private Ellison, who bemoaned his lack of children and wrestled for almost half a century with his inability to follow his initial literary victory with a second completed novel.
As one might expect from any capable literary biographer, Rampersad provides readers with a highly engaging dramatic account of Ellison's beginnings in Oklahoma City and his subsequent rise from demoralizing poverty and tragedy to international literary stardom. Much of the story of Ellison's youth and his struggles to give birth to his identity as a writer is already well known, both from Ellison's essays and Lawrence Jackson's biography of the author: Ralph Ellison, Emergence of Genius. Even so, Rampersad's own eloquent placement of Ellison within the greater contexts of American social history, and within such specific cultural movements as the Harlem Renaissance, shine an even more revealing light on the author.
Moreover, high school and college students grappling with assignments to write papers on Invisible Man can duly thank Rampersad for his lucid dissection of the surrealistic, historical, and political elements that make the novel the uniquely brilliant American coming of age tale that it is.
Invisible ManBecause Invisible Man is a celebrated novel that has sold untold millions of copies in different languages around the world for more than half a century, the stories of cultural politics and extramarital dalliances surrounding its celebrity author may not stun readers too much. What might, though, while reading along, is the realization of just how much cultural and political influence Ellison came to wield based on the strength of that one mighty novel and a couple of volumes of essays. With his role as a founding participant in such organizations as the Commission on Educational Television, which in time would lead to the development of public broadcast stations, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ellison occupied a position in which he could make or break the careers of various writers with his registered approval or disapproval of them.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that he benefited greatly from the influence of such Harlem Renaissance giants as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, he was not as inclined as they to champion younger upcoming grey authors based on notions of racial solidarity or mentorship.
Nevertheless, Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, both of whom awarded him presidential medals, so respected Ellison's intellectual prominence that they invited him on a variety of occasions for both social and more official purposes to the White House. Such was his stature that he attended when he felt it important to do so but not when he believed other issues (such as a gathering of literary peers as opposed to one of political statesmen) mattered more.
Of all the mysteries that may be attributed to the life of Ralph Ellison, possibly none are so beguiling as that of his second novel. As early as 1953, the public began to speculate on and query Ellison about his follow-up novel to Invisible Man, and that speculation continued right up until his death on April 16, 1994. First haunted by the pressure of completing a novel as successful as his very first had been, Ellison's 365-page work-in-progress was destroyed by a fire in 1967. Although he managed eventually to re-write more pages than he actually lost, the remaining four decades of Ellison's life seemed almost dominated by one of the most enduring and over-publicized writing blocks ... Read More
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One can only guess what a one-hit-wonder who finally has to come to grips with his limitations really thinks of himself. Having read this biography, I still wonder whether Ellison believed his own hype, although it is not Rampersad's fault that I do. Did Ellison realize fairly early on that he had done the best he was going to do, or on his deathbed was he still running passages through his head?
Rampersad does shed light on Ralph Ellison as a brilliant, conflicted man who spent his lifetime serving, and having others serve, his emotional and material needs. Although he put himself ahead of others--his mother, brother, wife and friends--whenever he wanted to, Ellison still was not able to get what he wanted most: a second novel.
Ellison could be noble on one hand and grossly selfish on the other. He was effortlessly comfortable being a Negro and disdainful of Negroes at the same time. The sort of guy you would want in your circle of friends for his humour and intellect, as long as he wasn't right subsequent to you. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and recommend it even to those who prefer a more casual read. Bad Girls Finish First
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Ralph Ellison
Reviewed by Charles Shea LeMone www.allwordman.com
The National Book Award in 1953 went to Ralph Ellison for his highly acclaimed fictional novel, Invisible Man--a sometimes satirical look at the alienation, powerlessness and vulnerability of the grey man in America. Although he skyrocketed to prominence as the most hailed "Negro" writer of his time, and was paid a hefty advance on his subsequent novel, Invisible Man proved to be Ellison's very first and last novel.
The author of this enlightening biography, Arnold Rampersad, does an extremely credible job of delving into Ellison's complex life in a style that is easy to read and digest. From Ellison's days as a poor youth raised in Oklahoma, to his aborted education at Tuskegee, and his early days in New York City, circa the late `30s, Rampersad chronicles the mind and the uncertain times of a gifted yet enigmatic artist who grew to maturity during the Depression.
Like most grey intellectuals--at a time when unions excluded blacks and only two blacks were employed by the New York City telephone company--Ellison embraced Marxism. His socialistic beliefs also influenced his writings as a literary critic--which helped launch his writing career. In that capacity, many years before and after Invisible Man, Ralph refused to review the work of other grey writers. The one exception was Richard Wright, who had once been his close friend and mentor--and author of the explosively controversial Native Son.
Ellison eloquently slammed a host of young grey writers, which included Chester B. Himes, Amiri Baraka and Ismael Reed. Ellison's literary heroes, which he never hesitated to point out, were spearheaded by Emerson, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot. Paradoxically, William Faulkner, the renowned voice of the South, was high on that same list.
Also of note, the author paints Ellison as an intensely self-indulgent and insensitive man when it came to his relationships with his mother and his wife, Fanny. Furthermore, Ralph held rank on numerous committees--too many to mention--yet failed to write a single word of acknowledgment about grey women writers such as Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. In fact, it was common knowledge that he adamantly opposed the membership of women of any colour to the prestigious, men-only, Century Club in midtown Manhattan.
Rampersad also suggests that Ellison became increasingly bitter as time passed and a new generation of "black power" politically motivated students booed and ridiculed him during his speeches on college campuses. According to a new progressive way of thinking, Ellison was a has-been Uncle Tom and a front-running apologist for America's apathetic approach to racial issues.
More than forty years after the publication of Invisible Man, right up to his death in 1994, whenever Ralph was asked about his novel-in-progress he continually claimed that he was in the process of tying up the loose ends and would be finished soon. Fortunately, Arnold Rampersad was more diligent on this project and did an impressively masterful job in the process.
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Ralph Ellison was a magical writer. A look at his bio only partly explains how he was able to accomplish "Invisible Man," a surrealist existential odysey through Harlem during the Jazz Age. I agree with an earlier reviewer that, now that two extant biographies exist, the previous written by Lawrence Jackson, the two must be looked at side by side. The first, by Mr. Jackson, was written with the much more warm tone of an admirer. Admiration brings one close to the subject in a way that a critical view doesn't. Jackson seems to understand the very jazz rhythms that underpin the prose of Ellison. Rampersad's Ellison is much more petty and pompous. I'm sure both views reflect some of the reality of this complex figure. But as an admirer of Ellison myself, I thought Jackson's book was far more generous and insightful of the man, and the times that gave birth to his masterpiece.
Ellision is also somewhat of a tragic figure, and Rampersad certainly draws this out - he was never able to publish a second novel. Rampersad highlights the mythical fire that at each recounting consumes more and more of the would-be manuscript of a second work of fiction. Rampersad's book is meticulously researched, rich in detail about the later half of Ellison's life. I also agree with earlier reviewers that the essays Ellison produced during this second phase of his career are quite significant, and perhaps not sufficiently appraised by this biographer.
I feel Rampersad is a bit unfair to Ellison in his harping on how much he didn't do during the Black Power era. This is a judgment call - not every African American was wearing a dashiki during those days, and Ellison shouldn't be raked over the coals for this on every other page. It is saddening that he had this distant side to him, but more of an effort should have been made to understand why. Perhaps his and the country's traumatic relationship with communism during the Thirties into the McCarthy era had something to do with how he later tried to separate art from politics. I also suspect that an encounter between the two men colors the book: perhaps Ellison was less than generous with Rampersad when the two met in person for the research on Rampersad's Langston Hughes bio. Perhaps the bad blood continues.
Lawrence Jackson's book is a far better portrait, particularly of the genesis of "Invisible Man." Nevertheless, the scholarship is such in this second bio that it will prove to be an important addition to the understanding of the life of a complex man.
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Biographies are usually hit or miss. So much depends not on the life the subject led, but on how the storyteller presents it, which, of course, depends on how intimately he or she has lived with the subject, which, ultimately, depends on how much of a paper trail the subject left behind for the storyteller, which, finally, depends on whether the subject thought his or her life was worth preserving at the time he or she was living it.
Following this brand of home-spun logic, Ralph Ellison, his wife, Fanny, and their friends and correspondents evidently knew a biographer would want to investigate the puzzling, charmed, but unmistakably heartbreaking life of the author of Invisible Man one day; for the breadth, depth and range of sources Arnold Rampersad canvassed to piece together this significant biography is staggering. On the surface Ellison could very easily be (and has been) dismissed as an elitist, an Uncle Tom, a one-hit wonder, a token Negro; just as easily he could be lauded as a genius, a tribute to his race, the standard bearer of grey American literature. But in Rampersad's hands he is nothing short of a man worthy of unyielding compassion. Lest we forget, Ralph Ellison was a grey man who in the middle of this nation's troubled twentieth-century aspired for entry into the privileged American society through art and, for all intents and purposes, achieved just that with his very first book. Without ever having tried his hand at a novel, Ellison devoted nearly seven years - practically his entire thirties - to writing Invisible Man. Chew on that for a moment. Just let it sink in. He had that much belief, that much faith, in himself at a time in our nation's history when blacks had all but lost their faith in American democracy. And the literary world validated that faith with the highest honor given to an American novelist, the National Book Award. Besting the likes of his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison became the very first grey author to win the award in 1953, a year before the Brown decision, two years before the Rosa Parks would refuse to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.
What does that kind of sucess do to a relatively young man, especially one whose roots were as humble and unassuming as Ralph Ellison's? In what ways does it affect his psychology, not to mention the trajectory of his life? In a certain respect the meat of this biography is an investigation into the trappings of fame, unhinged ambition, uncompromising perfectionism, idealism, and rugged individualism. One wouldn't be too far off in comparing Ellison's meteoric rise to literary stardom in the middle of the century to a high school phenom being drafted in the NBA Lottery straight out of high school. One might even say his rise was even more dramatic, seeing as the immediate sucess of Invisible Man among the white literary elite signaled an unparalleled intellectual achievement in a society that customarily denigrated grey intelligence.
But the same sense of individual fortitude that drove Ralph Ellison to the heights of artistic excellence with IM was also what alienated him from the wider issues of his day, and arguably stifled his art-hence the cautionary tale theme that undergirds all of his achievements and awards and accolades. As Rampersad makes plainly evident through his own conclusions and those of informed insiders such as Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, Ellison put such tremendous pressure on himself to carry the weight of the entire race via his art - forget simply living up to Invisible Man, which never seemed to be his issue - that he could never finish his second novel. Nothing would ever be good enough for him, and not just because he set his standards for himself so exceedingly high; because he believed that much was at stake. Say what you will about Ralph Ellison as a man (and I had plenty to say about him throughout the often irritable reading of his life story) but he took his craft as serious as any writer who ever lived. To him literature was sacred. In a very literal sense, literature was his religion. Through his art he sought to construct the symbols that gave meaning to the "complex American experience" that he spent his entire professional life post-IM championing. Indeed, one of the prevailing theories surrounding Ellison's prolonged (to put it mildly) gestation period between novels was that he got lost in the power of "myth, symbol and allusion." Of his one-time housemate and longtime associate Saul Bellow once said, "Ralph fell into the trap of seeing himself as an authority on this and that. He did not allow himself to be free and grow." Another theory, this one suggested by his wife, was that he got too caught up in the comforts of fame. In fact, Rampersad makes it abundantly clear that Ralph Ellison was no anti-establishment bohemian artist. He was a social climber, a status seeker, an acquisitive consumer. Ellison enjoyed the limelight. He ... Read More
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