Synopses & Reviews
The definitive biography of one of the most important American writers and cultural intellectuals of the twentieth century Ralph Ellison, author of the masterpiece Invisible Man.
In 1953, Ellison's explosive story of an innocent young black man's often surreal search for truth and his identity won him the National Book Award for fiction and catapulted him to national prominence. Ellison went on to earn many other honors, including two presidential medals and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but his failure to publish a second novel, despite years of striving, haunted him for the rest of his life. Now, as the first scholar given complete access to Ellison's papers, Arnold Rampersad has written not only a reliable account of the main events of Ellison's life but also a complex, authoritative portrait of an unusual artist and human being.
Born poor and soon fatherless in 1913, Ralph struggled both to belong to and to escape from the world of his childhood. We learn here about his sometimes happy, sometimes harrowing years growing up in Oklahoma City and attending Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Arriving in New York in 1936, he became a political radical before finally embracing the cosmopolitan intellectualism that would characterize his dazzling cultural essays, his eloquent interviews, and his historic novel. The second half of his long life brought both widespread critical acclaim and bitter disputes with many opponents, including black cultural nationalists outraged by what they saw as his elitism and misguided pride in his American citizenship.
This biography describes a man of magnetic personality who counted Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Richard Wilbur, Albert Murray, and John Cheever among his closest friends; a man both admired and reviled, whose life and art were shaped mainly by his unyielding desire to produce magnificent art and by his resilient faith in the moral and cultural strength of America.
A magisterial biography of Ralph Waldo Ellison a revelation of the man, the writer, and his times.
Review
"Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled in magisterial prose the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography." Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Review
"Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is probably the Great American Novel. Arnold Rampersad's long-awaited and beautifully spun Ralph Ellison is a great American biography." David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Review
"Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography." Cornel West
Review
"Ralph Ellison's place in American literature demands a biography that is as eloquent, thorough and wise as its subject. This is it. The book represents a flawless match of biographer and subject in Arnold Rampersad's hands we fathom both the burden and measure of Ellison's brilliance." Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Review
"Ralph Ellison: A Biography portrays with unusual insight one of the most elusive figures in the history of American literature. Whether treating Ellison's controversial aloofness from civil rights militancy, his passionate lifelong effort to understand America, or the long gestation and writing of Invisible Man, every page of Rampersad's richly detailed portrait dramatizes one of Ellison's favorite words: complexity." Kenneth Silverman, author, Edgar A. Poe, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Review
"Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison is the fullest and most authoritative study of Ellison's life and work to date. A celebration and defense of a triumphant and heroic life, it is bluntly unhagiographic and painstakingly attentive to Ellison's foibles. Ralph Ellison is at once an astute portrait of a complicated man and a social and literary history of his times a major book on a major American writer." Daniel Aaron, author, Writers on the Left
Synopsis
The first scholar to be given complete access to Ralph Ellison's papers provides a glimpse not only into the events of Ellison's life, but also into the complex inner makeup of the man a magisterial biography of the writer and his times.
Synopsis
Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel
Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellisons strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage.
Starting with Ellisons hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma and his ordeal as a student in Alabama, Rampersad documents his improbable, painstaking rise in New York to a commanding place on the literary scene. With scorching honesty but also fair and compassionate, Rampersad lays bare his subjects troubled psychology and its impact on his art and on the people about him.This book is both the definitive biography of Ellison and a stellar model of literary biography.
About the Author
Arnold Rampersad is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and a member of the Department of English at Stanford University. His books include biographies of Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson, and he collaborated with Arthur Ashe on his memoir, Days of Grace. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Stanford, California.