Word: ellisons
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SHADOW & ACT by Ralph Ellison. 317 pages. Random House...
According to James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones, Malcolm X and any number of other writers and seers, the U.S. Negro is consumed with hatred of whites and is on the verge of doing some foul and desperate deed. Negro Writer Ralph Ellison's coolly reasoned essays are a timely rebuttal of this extravagant thesis. In clean, brisk, unapocalyptic prose, Ellison denies that "unrelieved suffering is the only 'real' Negro experience, and that the true Negro writer must be ferocious. . . . What an easy con-game for ambitious, publicity-hungry Negroes this stance of 'militancy' has become...
Separate & Superior. Ellison is no Uncle Tom; his credentials as a "militant" are all in order. He has written what is generally agreed to be the best U.S. Negro novel-a good novel by any standards-The Invisible Man. Yet in these essays, written over two decades and covering matters of race, literature, music and his own upbringing, Ellison asserts that Negroes have no monopoly on tragedy. Life everywhere, he writes, is a "mixture of the marvelous and the terrible." To single out a particular people as special sufferers is a form of escapism...
C.P.T. Harlem, wrote Negro Novelist Ralph (The Invisible Man) Ellison in a 1948 essay, is "the scene...
...merciless rendering of the type of Southerner who constantly vents his frustration with lines such as "What this country needs is white labor. Let these damn trifling niggers starve for a couple of years, then they'd see what a soft thing they have." Negro Novelist Ralph Ellison says that the enduring Dilsey Gibson reminds him of the real-life Rosa Parks, who touched off the Birmingham, Ala., bus boycott one day in 1955 when she refused to stand up for a white passenger because her feet hurt. Lucas Beauchamp catches to perfection the abrasive, unbending independence...