Introduction: "A Celebrated Artist and Visible Man"1
The name Ralph Ellison reverberates throughout contemporary Afro-American intellectual discourse. Hated or revered, Ellison is considered a formidable foe or ally. Of living Afro-American writers Ellison's influence among his black contemporaries is unsurpassed except perhaps by Amiri Baraka and, now, Toni Morrison. He has long been a standard-bearer for black fiction writers, an imprimatur of ethnic excellence. The significance of Ellison is quite remarkable insofar as he has not been particularly prolific. Though best known as a novelist, Ellison has published only one novel in over fifty years of writing.Ellison's status within black arts and letters was established in 1952 with the publication of Invisible Man. Invisible Man was not immediately celebrated in all circles. As Jacqueline Covo has noted in The Blinking Eye: Ralph Waldo Ellison and His American, French, German, and Italian Critics, 1952-1971, most early reviews of the novel raised questions about its technical competence. Some reviewers claimed that it was poorly written. Few engaged its thesis. The brilliance of the "invisibility" theme, when coupled with Ellison's master craftsmanship, ultimately propelled the novel to a celebrated status within most major American literary circles. Gradually Ellison rose from an unknown, poverty-stricken writer to a prominent national intellectual figure. Invisible Man was awarded the 1953 National Book Award. Ellison, the first Afro-American to receive this prestigious literary award, had indeed "arrived." Though Richard Wright, the dean of Afro-American literature and the most celebrated black novelist of the period, was alive and writing in France, Ellison became for many the new standard of excellence for black American writing. Given the racial parochialism of the broader intellectual community, Ellison was at times relegated to a corner inhabited only by Negro writers, leading Time magazine to "honor" him by calling him the "best of all U.S. Negro writers." In discussing Invisible Man, Nathan Scott has written, "It was of course, in the spring of that year that Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man burst upon the scene, and the astonishing authority of its art and of the systematic vision of the world which this art expressed immediately won for the book a preeminence which in the intervening years, far from being in any way diminished, has so consolidated itself that it is today universally regarded as an established classic of modern American literature." Ellison's admirers often mention the 1965 Book Week poll of two hundred writers, critics, and editors that named Invisible Man as "the most distinguished work published in the last twenty years." Even Norman Mailer, whose "quick and expensive comments" were sharply condemnatory of "most talents in the room," wrote admiringly of Ellison,
"That Ralph Ellison is very good is dull to say. He is essentially a hateful writer; when the line of his satire is pure, he writes so perfectly that one can never forget the experience of reading him--it is like holding a live electric wire in one's hand.. . . Where Ellison can go, I have no idea. His talent is too exceptional to allow for casual predictions, and if one says that the way for Ellison may be to adventure out into the difficult and conceivably more awful invisibility of the white man--well, it is a mistake to write prescriptions for a novelist as gifted as Ellison."
A decade after the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison published a collection of essays, Shadow and Act, which revealed a brilliant critical intellect. The book contained previously published essays and interviews and a few new essays. The subject matter ranged from jazz musicians and gospel/blues singers to a review of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemna. It contained essays about the culture of the Negro and a condensed version of Ellison's contribution to the now famous exchange with Irving Howe. Ellison was not only a fine fiction writer but also a precise interpreter of American literary culture and the writer's craft. Shadow and Act contains the most comprehensive statements yet collected of Ellison's views of Afro-American life and folk culture and their relationship to the Afro-American writer. Within some intellectual/artistic circles, this collection of essays has obtained the status of a classic, and rightly so. Stanley Edgar Hyman celebrated it from his central vantage point within the white literary establishment. In his review "Ralph Ellison in Our Time," Hyman wrote, "Shadow and Act is a monument of integrity, a banner proclaiming 'the need to keep literary standards high'. In his insight into the complexity of American experience, Ralph Ellison is the profoundest cultural critic that we have, and his hard doctrine of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity is a wisdom rare in our time."
1 Excerpted from Jerry Gafio Watts. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro- American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 25-27.
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