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“... In 1955, Ralph Ellison took part in a roundtable discussion on the subject ‘What’s Wrong with the American Novel?’ I came across the transcript recently and it opened my eyes. The first speakers twitter along, blaming readers for the novel’s decline. Then Ellison speaks up, and blames one party only: ‘There has been a failure of writers ...”

“... Ralph Ellison wrote his own running commentary on the mammoth fiction he laboured over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers Callahan has invited into the unfinished structure ...”

“... forms of Christianity celebrated in Southern churches. There must be ways in which writers like Ralph Ellison and Alice Walker are bound to acknowledge their indebtedness to white Southern writing, as to its European sources. If The Color Purple may be read as a novel about the acquiring of literacy, becoming a reader and a writer, and the meaning of ...”

“... black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with ...”

“... had worked as a rancher and mule trainer.) In his essay ‘Hidden Name and Complex Fate’, Ralph Ellison, who reduced his middle name (Waldo) to a ‘simple and mysterious “W.”’, argued that African Americans – ‘especially if we are potential writers’ – may be ‘more than ordinarily concerned’ with the associations their names ...”

“... a single slight instance must suffice – that The Invisible Man ‘probably provided the novelist Ralph Ellison, an important black observer of America, with the title for his work Invisible Man (1952)’. Again, although Professor Smith no doubt judges the quality of a scientific or literary work to be much more important than its degree of financial ...”

“... and extravagant praise from American critics. Whitehead is black and comparisons were made to Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed. John Updike has called him ‘blithely gifted’, ‘the young African-American writer to watch’. Whitehead’s new novel, John Henry Days, is longer and more ambitious than The Intuitionist, and the ...”

“... time. On any morning that summer, Little might have brushed shoulders with the slender, watchful Ralph Ellison, passing through the Harlem YMCA, where Little roomed for a time only a block away from Small’s. Ellison was preparing himself to write the great black American novel, and he later set an important scene in ...”

“... more important than my life.’ Nora distinguishes the Woman Upstairs from the black man in a ‘Ralph Ellison basement full of light bulbs’ or ‘the madwomen in the attic’. The Woman Upstairs is ‘the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and ...”

“... writer is going to have on the inward aspects of black lives. She was good – but she wasn’t Ralph Ellison. Whatever the reason, three years into the project, Lee was flailing. ‘My agent wants pure gore and autopsies,’ she wrote to Peck, ‘my publisher wants another bestseller, and I want a clear conscience, in that I haven’t defrauded the ...”

“... was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the disregarded speech and customs of the people the ...”

“... In​ 1942, Ralph Ellison had a meeting with Fredric Wertham, the director of psychiatric services at Queens General Hospital in New York. Ellison, who was eligible for the draft, didn’t want to join a segregated army. A friend had suggested that Wertham might find a way to get him a psychiatric deferment ...”

“... at the time of the celebrated Agrarian manifesto, I’ll take my stand (1930), and even told Ralph Ellison and Eugene Walter in 1957 that this unreadiness had been an ‘objective’ fact in 1929. The posture does Warren an injustice. The early statement is less crudely inhumane than it is made to seem, and the subsequent record is honourable. But ...”

“... outlook. At the Harvard International Summer Seminar of 1965, directed by Henry Kissinger, he told Ralph Ellison: ‘I believe that the problem of American blacks comes from the two refuges they have constructed for themselves: Christianity and jazz.’ But he became more and more apolitical and pessimistic. Despite his return to religion, he never ...”

“... 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 ...”