Ralph Ellison

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-- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers

Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. "Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly humorous gusto".--Atlantic.

Since the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, Ralph Ellison has been widely recognized as a major writer who has made lasting contributions to American, African American, and modernist traditions. This book traces the response to his works from the initial reviews of Invisible Man to the posthumous publication of Ellison's second novel, Juneteenth, in 1999. While the bulk of the volume includes previously published essays and reviews of Invisible Man, the book also includes sections devoted to Ellison's short fiction and nonfiction. It concludes with several posthumous estimates of Ellison's work and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary materials.

Schor traces the development of Ralph Ellison's writings from the earliest experiments to the major accomplishment of his novel Invisible Man, the mature prose of the Hickman Stories, and the other published portions of his novel-in-progress. The study considers the two-fold obligation Ellison felt in committing himself to literature: a commitment to the craft of fiction and to the shaping of a culture. The early stories mark Ellison's "mazelike" route that developed the skill, talent, and imagination and personal vision to transform experience into art. In Schor's discussion of Ellison's work, essays and interviews are used to comment directly on the fiction, as are insights by other critics. The study concludes with a bibliography of Ellison's fiction and nonfiction and a selected secondary bibliography.

As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Veve Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Genevieve Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.

In this exploration of the relationship between biblical apocalypse and black fiction, Maxine Montgomery argues that American writers see apocalyptic events in an intermediate and secular sense, as a tenable response to racial oppression. This work analyzes the characters, plots, and themes of seven novels that rely on the apocalyptic trope.