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“... Henry Roth’s silence was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with ...”

“... paintings (Renoir, Picasso, Degas); travelled to Egypt and the Caribbean; in New York they knew Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Alfred Kazin, John Cheever, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Clark.When Hazzard met Steegmuller, he was engaged in an on-off relationship with another woman, or so he said. ‘Everybody knew’ he was ...”

“... unfolded by reading about them in the Herald Tribune. Richard Wright remained in Paris. Neither Ralph Ellison nor Langston Hughes took part in the Civil Rights Movement (and Ellison took a dim view of Baldwin’s involvement), just as writers like Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney avoided active involvement in the public ...”

“... he complained of her ‘motiveless malignancy’. At one party, convinced she was flirting with Ralph Ellison, Schwartz ‘stormed off, literally dragging her along, handbag, shoes, cigarettes, hairpins flying’.In 1957, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to teach at the Free University of Berlin. On the day they were to set sail for ...”

“... with his frequent ill-humour as well as his pleasure in jokes. The narrator is called Thelonious Ellison – given the echo of a certain version of ‘Autumn Leaves’ in the soundtrack, he could probably have been called Ralph Davis – and is marvellously played by Jeffrey Wright, who keeps us at a distance while ...”

“... it for his own darkly funny and deadly serious purposes. The narrator has parallels with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy (both inheritors of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man). The accident on the set of the war movie alludes to Invisible Man, and the arrogant, racist Auteur takes the place of the white man who ...”

“... in fine detail about his depiction of Italian immigrants. There were certainly places where Ralph Ellison would be called out for Invisible Man’s representation of the Negro and for his views on the race question. But at Yeshiva University Philip Roth was always going to be the main dish. By accepting a Jewish university’s invitation, di Donato ...”