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The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library)

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Containing essays and speeches by Ralph Ellison (1914-1994), as well as several interviews with him, this book gives a representative sample of this great American writer's entire career. It's a great read for those interested in American politics, American history, the broad issues of race, American art, literature, and music (jazz especially!), and how much of our American life today was/is shaped by the struggle for racial integration. For the literary minded, Ellison is an extremely talented essayist in the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, though certainly more down to earth (thank goodness!). You also get a great introduction to Ellison by the late Nobel laureate, Saul Bellow. The essay format in this volume is also very enjoyable: you can just dip in at random and read a whole essay in just half an hour.

A couple favorite passages: "As a kid I remember working it out this way: there was a world in which you wore your everyday clothes on Sunday, and there was a world in which you wore your Sunday clothes every day. I wanted the world in which you wore your Sunday clothes every day. I wanted it because it represented something better, a more exciting and civilized and human way of living, a world which came to me through certain scenes of felicity which I encountered in fiction, in the movies, and which I glimpsed sometimes through the windows of great houses on Sunday afternoons when my mother took my brother and me for walks through the wealthy white sections of the city. I know it now for a boy's vague dream of possibility." (from "That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview")

"To put it drastically, if war, as Clausewitz insisted, is the continuation of politics by other means, it requires little imagination to see American life since the abandonment of the Reconstruction as an abrupt reversal of that formula: the continuation of the Civil War by means other than arms." (from "Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction")