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A Biography
Knopf
May 2007
On Sale: April 24, 2007
672 pages
ISBN: 0375408274
EAN: 9780375408274
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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