Word: ellisons
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...words still seep into the reader's marrow, 42 years after they were first ( published. "I am an invisible man," Ralph Ellison declared in the opening sentence of his only novel. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." If they do register his presence, it is as "a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy...
Invisible Man, in which a young black relates the surreal events leading to his ultimate isolation, earned best-novel-of-its-time raves from the college of critics. It established Ellison in the permanent firmament of American writers, a place he still occupied at his death last week from pancreatic cancer, six weeks after his 80th birthday. But Invisible Man was more than a gorgeously written piece of fiction. Because its phantasmagoric satire of mid- century life in Harlem and the American South proved prophetic, the book became a blueprint for inner-city discontent. Invisible Man taught two generations...
Most of the time, the dapper Ellison got along with blacks and whites. He was the precocious child of doting parents in Oklahoma City. "I'm raising this boy to be a poet," said Ellison's father, a small businessman who named him after Ralph Waldo Emerson and died when the child was three. Ralph's mother worked as a domestic and recruited blacks for the Socialist Party. There was no shortage of role models for Ralph; he attended a grammar school named for Frederick Douglass and won a scholarship to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. While...
...burden of a pioneer to be the presumed spokesman for all "his people." Ellison, a sensible gent, declined this honor. He was not every black writer; he was a black writer -- or, as he might prefer, a writer. And, for some blacks, he was guilty of having allowed himself to be praised by white critics. In the '60s, when the civil rights sing-along gave way to Black Power shock therapy, Ellison found himself overshadowed by more urgent novelists, such as Richard Wright (Native Son), who played Malcolm X to Ellison's Martin Luther King Jr. Ellison compiled two volumes...
...unfashionable fact is that Ellison's writing was too refined, elaborate, to be spray painted on a tenement wall. He was a celebrator as much as a denouncer of the nation that bred him. In his multicolored vision, America was not just a violent jungle but a vibrant jumble of many cultures and temperaments; it mingled melody, harmony, dissonance and ad-lib genius, like the jazz that Ellison played, wrote about and loved...