Ralph Waldo Ellison* (1914-1997)

*Author of Invisible Man, the novel voted in 1965 by the American literary establishment to be "the most distinguished single work" published in America since 1945

Influences on Ellison's writing:

  • Frontier experience of growing up in early 20thC Oklahoma
  • Black American folklore and oral traditions of storytelling
  • Classical music he learned and played in high school, and studied in college
  • Jazz and blues music he played and listened to all his life.
  • Reading of all kinds (he and his young friends aspired to be "Renaissance men")
  • European literature and literary theory (Sophocles, Homer, picaresque novels of the Spanish  Renaissance, Grimm's fairy tales, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevski, Joseph Conrad, Andre Malraux,  George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, modernists)
  • American literature and literary theory (Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman,  Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism, Mark Twain, Henry James,  Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale  Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes)
  • Freud and psychoanalytic theory
  • American life in general — its fluidity and discontinuity, and the dreamlike, absurd experience of American reality  that Black Americans grow up with.

On Ellison's refusal to write according to a narrow formula:

  • "European civilization, of which [Ellison] is a part, cannot be written off lightly.  Emerson and Einstein, Mozart and Michelangelo, Jefferson and Joyce are part of his tradition and he has paid for them in blood.  He is not about to bargain them away in exchange for Negritude.  The Negro [separatist] demands that for the sake of injured pride the Western self be put to death.  But if the injury is real, the remedy is disastrous.  What is separatism but the sulking of a rejected child?  The American Negro, after all, is no stranger to the affairs of this nation.  Nor can he stand aside from its appointed destiny.  For if the house burns, one thing is certain:  the American Negro will not escape the conflagration.
  • "...Ellison steers a steady course [between separatism and assimilation into white middle-class culture].  On the one hand, he wants in:  no one, white or colored, will persuade him that he is an outsider.... On the other hand, he is not about to trade in his tested techniques of survival on some white man's vague promise: 'Be like us and we will accept you maybe.'  When he comes in, he brings his chittlins with him.  If in the process he transforms America into a nation of chittlin-eaters, so much the better for our ethnic cooking.
  • "...The American Negro is different from his white countrymen, but American history and that alone has made him so....It follows [Ellison says] that 'any viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole.'
  • "...American culture is still in process of becoming.  It is not a finished form, a house that one day will be rented out to Negroes.  On the contrary, in the process of racial integration the culture will be radically transformed.  This transformation will amount to a correction of perspective.  By degrees, the white man's truncated version of American reality will be enlarged.  The American eye will be retrained to see sights hitherto ignored, or if seen, misconstrued for venal ends.  Connections formerly obscure will now be plain; the essential oneness of American civilization will emerge.  Ultimately Americans will develop a new image of themselves as a nation.
  • "'I was taken very early,' Ellison remarks, 'with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond.'  This passion is the driving force ofhis career.  It can be felt in his response to jazz as well as his approach to fiction.  It accounts, moreover, for his views on politics and art.  For the linking together which he has in mind can barely begin in courthouse and in workshop, neighborhood and school.  It must be consummated in some inner realm, where all men meet on common ground.  Such are the links that Ellison would forge, the new reality he would create, the shattered psyche of the nation that he would make whole."

--Robert Bone, "Ralph Ellison and the Uses of Imagination"

© Judith Lightfoot, 1999

Ralph Ellison, Webliography - some interesting Ellison links on the Web.
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