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“... even more elusive, even more entrenched in human affairs’. It’s an idea that made sense to Ralph Ellison, who took Delano’s question as the epigraph to Invisible Man. But there’s an element of wishful thinking here. ‘Benito Cereno’ is nothing like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Melville’s Babo – intelligent and coldly resolute – would find no ...”

“... notion that replying to letters was nothing if not a complete and utter waste of time. To Ralph Ellison: ‘I’ve never enjoyed writing letters. Vasiliki says that Isaac, whose journals she took after his death, had some uncomplimentary things to say about the way I answered letters. I deserve them. There is some wickedness hidden here and I ...”

“... to anti-racist movements. At one point, Franklin describes the way Hyman and Jackson encouraged Ralph Ellison, a friend, to write when he didn’t yet trust his talent. (An earlier biography of Jackson by Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons, takes a chattier approach and relies heavily on anecdotes provided by Jackson’s North Bennington neighbours and ...”

“... had missed 3 per cent of men of draft age, while the shortfall for Black men was 13 per cent. Was Ralph Ellison thinking of this while writing Invisible Man? ‘I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.’Langston Hughes’s story ‘Data for Simple’s Census’, which first appeared in the Chicago Defender in November ...”

“... lives of Black artists, diplomats, writers and other extraordinary figures who lived in the city. (Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright were also supported by the programme, though McKay was never close to either.) FWP resources allowed McKay to produce Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), a sociological study of cults, occultists and street-corner orators that ...”

“... the first person to state that Huck’s voice is, in crucial ways, at least partly black. In 1970, Ralph Ellison claimed ‘the black man [was] a co-creator of the language that Mark Twain raised to the level of literary eloquence ... without the presence of blacks, the book [Huckleberry Finn] could not have been written. No Huck and Jim, no American ...”

“... life without being bothered by women and non-whites; the rare outsider they listened to, such as Ralph Ellison, concluded, as Greif points out, that universal humanity in a universal history ‘makes ruined buildings, and dead men’. Greif knows​ that the American interrogation of the crisis of man was programmed to receive ‘a single inductive or ...”

“... success Wright had done much to promote, wasn’t the only protégé to turn against him. In 1963 Ralph Ellison wrote that, in Bigger Thomas, Wright had created not a black character other black people would recognise, but ‘a near subhuman indictment of white oppression’ crudely ‘designed to shock whites out of their apathy’. ...”

“... I write ‘about’: but also for everyone else whom I can reach. I am of the same opinion as Ralph Ellison, who says that he finds something precious in being black in America: but that he is also reaching for more than that. ‘I was taken very early,’ he writes, ‘with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all ...”

“... than read Coates’s blog and nod. ‘Need my skin blind me to all other values?’ an exasperated Ralph Ellison wrote in 1963. It’s a question Coates and many others wouldn’t think to ask today. The crisis of the black intellectual now, if there is one, isn’t that he lacks the means or the platform to represent his people but that it is too easy to ...”

“... not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text. Imagine recording the ...”

“... Jerry remarks to his sceptical black girlfriend, before making an uncomfortable allusion to Ralph Ellison: ‘I enjoyed being an alien. Fuck them. The invisible man. Fine.’ Perhaps more damagingly, Kelman’s satire on the US security industry is curiously tame. Not only has DeLillo done this kind of thing with greater gusto and vision, but ...”

“... a cautionary roster of the silent that included Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison. Heller’s history reflected theirs – the dreams of youth and years of literary apprenticeship, a period of obsessed scribbling, enthusiasm from a publisher, a ripple of applause from the fraternity of reviewers, followed by the ever ...”

“... he is probably best regarded as the intellectual child of the great 19th-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his admirer the poet Walt Whitman. Bloom inherited rhetorical tics from Emerson, in particular a penchant for the resounding statement that hypes its own grandeur to the skies. He also took from him intellectual priorities: a cultural ...”

“... and his real-life followers who provoked James Baldwin in ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’ and Ralph Ellison in ‘The World and the Jug’ to fight hard against Native Son as a model for black writers. These essays are pertinent to the sort of reading Martha Nussbaum wants to perform. They are a warning against it. Nussbaum comes close to saying that ...”