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Ralph Ellison: A Biography

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This was a really good book--but it was very long. Rampersad conveys:

* The good, bad and ugly of Ellison's time at Tuskeegee.

* The cantankerous personality of Ralph Ellison--his opinionated personality, his love of the Western intellectual tradition, his male chauvinism and his love of WASPishness and aristocracy. Ironically, Ellison was not only a symbol of macho intellectualism, he was also a victim of it when he's confronted by "Black Power" students during that era. Black nationalists criticized him for being silent regarding oppression of Blacks and subservient to rich white society people; Ellison criticized young Black nationalistic writers (in a blanket characterization) for poor or unhoned literary skills and putting message ahead of craft. After reading this book, now I can see that both sides were partially right. (The most painful for me of Ellison's silence was his cheery participation on the board of Colonial Williamsburg in an era where they used the term "servants" but not "slaves" or "slavery".)

* The gossip about prominent intellectuals was interesting. If you think rappers are hostile to each other, they have nothing on the intellectuals of Ellison's era who had grudges against each other, hurled essays at each other, alliances, and played politics with the awarding of club memberships, board positions and literary awards. Pretty funny.

*The devotion of Ellison's wife who supported his writing career (before Invisible Man was published) by working full-time, then coming home and doing all of the cooking.

By the end of this book, the burden of the work-in-progress was paining me as much as it was Ralph Ellison. If only he could have completed it!

I still have not read Invisible Man. I might, I might not. But I will never forget the personality of the man as evidenced in this bio.

Ralph Ellison had a fascinating life and this book captures the journey!

Arnold Rampersad has written a magisterial and eminently fair biography of one of this country's most important, yet most inaccessible, novelists--Ralph Ellison. The achievement of this book is to compel us to recognize the genius that went into the writing of Invisible Man yet also to regret the impediments that prevented Ellison from ever completing a second novel. It is a story of an immensely ambitious man who, once becoming famous, set himself even more distant goals that he could never reach. Frustrated, hurting within, he hurt others around him, particularly other black people (including his long-suffering wife). At the end, he was alone with himself and his honors, his fame, but also with a bitterness that was at once his protection and his weapon. Rampersad sees all of this and describes it with an unerring eye. A superb book.

Biographies are usually hit or miss. So much depends not on the life the subject led, but on how the storyteller presents it, which, of course, depends on how intimately he or she has lived with the subject, which, ultimately, depends on how much of a paper trail the subject left behind for the storyteller, which, finally, depends on whether the subject thought his or her life was worth preserving at the time he or she was living it.


Following this brand of home-spun logic, Ralph Ellison, his wife, Fanny, and their friends and correspondents evidently knew a biographer would want to investigate the puzzling, charmed, but unmistakably heartbreaking life of the author of Invisible Man one day; for the breadth, depth and range of sources Arnold Rampersad canvassed to piece together this significant biography is staggering. On the surface Ellison could very easily be (and has been) dismissed as an elitist, an Uncle Tom, a one-hit wonder, a token Negro; just as easily he could be lauded as a genius, a tribute to his race, the standard bearer of black American literature. But in Rampersad's hands he is nothing short of a man worthy of unyielding compassion. Lest we forget, Ralph Ellison was a black man who in the middle of this nation's troubled twentieth-century aspired for entry into the privileged American society through art and, for all intents and purposes, achieved just that with his first book. Without ever having tried his hand at a novel, Ellison devoted nearly seven years - practically his entire thirties - to writing Invisible Man. Chew on that for a moment. Just let it sink in. He had that much belief, that much faith, in himself at a time in our nation's history when blacks had all but lost their faith in American democracy. And the literary world validated that faith with the highest honor given to an American novelist, the National Book Award. Besting the likes of his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison became the first black author to win the award in 1953, a year before the Brown decision, two years before the Rosa Parks would refuse to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

What does that kind of success do to a relatively young man, especially one whose roots were as humble and unassuming as Ralph Ellison's? In what ways does it affect his psychology, not to mention the trajectory of his life? In a certain respect the meat of this biography is an investigation into the trappings of fame, unhinged ambition, uncompromising perfectionism, idealism, and rugged individualism. One wouldn't be too far off in comparing Ellison's meteoric rise to literary stardom in the middle of the century to a high school phenom being drafted in the NBA Lottery straight out of high school. One might even say his rise was even more dramatic, seeing as the immediate success of Invisible Man among the white literary elite signaled an unparalleled intellectual achievement in a society that customarily denigrated black intelligence.

But the same sense of individual fortitude that drove Ralph Ellison to the heights of artistic excellence with IM was also what alienated him from the wider issues of his day, and arguably stifled his art-hence the cautionary tale theme that undergirds all of his achievements and awards and accolades. As Rampersad makes plainly evident through his own conclusions and those of informed insiders such as Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, Ellison put such tremendous pressure on himself to carry the weight of the entire race via his art - forget simply living up to Invisible Man, which never seemed to be his issue - that he could never finish his second novel. Nothing would ever be good enough for him, and not just because he set his standards for himself so exceedingly high; because he believed that much was at stake. Say what you will about Ralph Ellison as a man (and I had plenty to say about him throughout the often irritable reading of his life story) but he took his craft as serious as any writer who ever lived. To him literature was sacred. In a very literal sense, literature was his religion. Through his art he sought to construct the symbols that gave meaning to the "complex American experience" that he spent his entire professional life post-IM championing. Indeed, one of the prevailing theories surrounding Ellison's prolonged (to put it mildly) gestation period between novels was that he got lost in the power of "myth, symbol and allusion." Of his one-time housemate and longtime associate Saul Bellow once said, "Ralph fell into the trap of seeing himself as an authority on this and that. He did not allow himself to be free and grow." Another theory, this one suggested by his wife, was that he got too caught up in the comforts of fame. In fact, Rampersad makes it abundantly clear that Ralph Ellison was no anti-establishment bohemian artist. He was a social climber, a status seeker, an acquisitive consumer. Ellison enjoyed the limelight. He reveled in his associations with power. He openly and unabashedly pined for entry into the hallowed halls of the American elite, for he believed in those institutions that celebrated American excellence, and made no bones about excluding anyone, particularly other blacks, who did not measure up to his standards. Following a lecture he once gave in northern Illinois a young white professor asked Ellison how it felt to "go places where most black men can't go." Rather than take offense, Ellison, always with his flair of dramatic irony countered, "What you mean is, how does it feel to be able to go places where most white men can't go."

The secret to his success (and his failure some would say) was his sense of himself as an American. He was a Negro (he deplored the label "black" when it came in to use in the 60's) and quite proud of that fact. But he considered himself an equal to all men by birth and to the most elite by dent of effort. But he was clouded by his own success. He believed too uncritically that his own rise to prominence could be utilized as an example to other blacks. If he could achieve on his own merit, then why couldn't every other black person? Why did other black writers need to resort to cheap racial ploys to attract attention to themselves? Why could they not simply hone their craft as he did? The problem with this logic was that Ellison hadn't achieved on his own. All along he was blessed with backers and boosters - nearly all of them white - who at times literally secured his survival or opened the necessary doors for him to enter. As for Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, both of whom played critical roles in nurturing his pursuits early on, Rampersad's evidence shows that Ellison grew increasingly critical and combative toward them once he no longer needed their guidance and support. "No, Wright was no spiritual father of mine," Ellison wrote in the early `60s, "certainly in no sense I recognize."

Indeed, Ellison's relationship with black people in general was cool at best. He was nostalgic and sentimental about Oklahoma City and the people who populated his memories of youth, but he had absolutely no interest in the newly liberated Africa (aside from collecting African art). He spent the better part of the civil rights era making a good deal of his living by lecturing on race (he was a devout integrationist who denounced the Black Power concept and yet was critical of Dr. King's style as well) and yet he would never lend his name or support (aside from he and Fanny's annual donation to the NAACP) to the civil rights movement proper. He was quick to accept writing assignments from leading white publications, but he routinely rejected the requests from fledgling black publications. He supported the Vietnam War despite the fact the young black men were being sent overseas in droves. In spite of its declining condition, the raft of crime and he and Fanny's financial wherewithal, the Ellison's categorically refused to leave their Riverside Drive apartment, and yet from the publication of IM on he was increasingly estranged from black Harlem, not to mention everyday blacks in general, a fact which some critics believed stifled his ability to capture the changing social reality of black American in his fiction.

But then, just when you think it's safe to write him off as a self-hating opportunist, the ever-irascible Ralph Ellison shows you something you didn't expect. When the socialist critic Irving Howe published the essay "Black Boys and Native Sons" lauding Wright's Native Son as the standard by which all black fiction should be judged because it expressed what the critic considered authentic black rage, Ellison eloquently dismantled Howe's essentialist rhetoric in the name of the broad tapestry that is black life. When he was invited to speak to the Panel of Educational Research and Development, he defended black youth and black culture against what he saw as the unfair and uninformed attacks being leveled against it. When Ronald Reagan began dismantling the New Deal structures that had "made it possible for me to go from sleeping on a park bench to becoming a writer," Ellison became a national sponsor of the Emergency Black Survival Fund.

Hiram Hayden, the one-time editor of the American Scholar, said it best when he described Ellison's "lonely burden" as that which belonged to "certain black men of a transitional generation..." "Scorned by militants," Rampersad continued, "too liberal for conservatives, lionized by liberal or calculating whites," Ellison was a man outside of time, which to some extent mirrored the surrealist style in which the final segment of IM is written. At once he was ahead of his time and behind his time, but never completely in it. At intervals his insistent positions made him the object of scorn and ridicule, as when, in what might be the book's most touching moment, Ellison breaks down and cries in the arms of a black student leader at a college in Iowa after being verbally assaulted by a young black man who accused him of being an "Uncle Tom" and a "sell-out." "I'm not a Tom, I'm not a Tom," wept the deeply wounded author. More often, his convictions made him the subject of adoration, as when he received literally countless awards for his independence and artistry.

No one ever chose his battles for him, and, upon closing this outstanding biography, that is what clearly mattered most to Ralph Ellison. He lived and died on his own terms, with his own demons, shortcomings-what have you. Lesser men would have retreated from public life in the face of unfulfilled expectations (Salinger, for example), but Ellison, as embarrassed as he was by his own lack of productivity, continued to stride toward his destiny, even if clumsily at times. Despite Rampersad's intimation that at some point Ellison stopped believing he was going to finish the second novel (Juneteenth), and that he secretly believed it was doomed, he never stopped working on it, never stopped trying to make it measure up to what he wanted it to be. And maybe that is the lesson. That even when we achieve our wildest dreams, the drive toward perfection is never complete; that however much we contribute to the world, we should never be satisfied; that no matter which road we choose there are bound to be thorns, ditches and roadblocks; that the absolute best we can hope for is that our lives are worth writing and reading about long after our time has run out.

Thank you Mr. Ellison for living a life worth reading about. And thank you Mr. Rampersad for bringing that life back to life.

Ralph Ellison did not have an easy road to literary greatness. Orphaned at three his mother forced to work as a domestic he suffered the injuries and insults of poverty and racism. Ramperad tells the story of Ellison's childhood , early development, his school years his apprenticeship in the world of music, the background of the world he knew in Oklahoma City and later on a student Tuskegee in Alabama where he learned much but never got his degree. The years in New York and the relationships with Richard Wright his true literary patron, and jazz trumpeter Al Rushton form too part of the background to the creation os his masterpiece. While his second wife Fanny worked and supported him it took Ellison six years to put together the mythic, symbolic, realistic masterpiece ' Invisible Man'.
Rampersand then tells the story of the long frustration, of the long- awaited, long- worked on second novel which never chrystallized as it could not come up to Ellison's own strict standard of the greatness he sought.
He tells of the intellectual Ellison's world of friendships, and his often strained relation with the black community. He tells of the many influences of his reading from Eliot's 'Waste Land' to Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Richard Wright. He speaks of the deleterious effect of the many honors Ellison received on his writing.He too gives a picture of an aloof, and less than kind and helping person of someone who did not extend himself to help young black writers and suffered from criticism of many in the black community.
He explores Ellison's identity as American writer and his complicated understanding of the exclusivist higher culture he sought to belong to and redefine.
He also tells the story of a husband who rewarded the wife did everything to help him with infidelity and abuse. Ellison's quarrelsome nature manifested itself everywhere he went, but had a particular gusto at home. Despite this the couple made it through over forty years together.
Rampersand above all tells the story of a proud, dedicated artist who would not settle for anything from himself but the highest in quality.
He tells the story of a brilliant writer and mind who somehow could not completely harnass in the years after his masterful opening the kind of grand visionary work he wanted to write.
The story of a writer whose first great first act was too difficult for he himself to follow.

The obvious place to begin is a comparison with Lawrence Jackson's 2002 unforunately named "Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius." Both are the same length, but Jackson covers Ellison's life only to 1952 when he won the National Book Award, while Rampersad goes to his death in 1994. Also, Rampersad had full access to the Ellison archives in the Library of Congress, while Jackson was permitted only the literary drafts and manuscripts there. This meant that Jackson did not have access to Ellison's personal correspondence, although he could view letters to other significant figures, such as Wright, Baldwin and Hughes who have their archives elsewhere.

There is also a lot going on behind the scenes here. Jackson started his book as a PhD dissertation at Stanford while Rampersad was faculty there; Rampersad claims in his acknowledgements that he finished his manuscript in 2003, but that it was delayed for three years due to pressing administrative duties (Hmmmm); in his acknowledgements section Jackson praises Robert O'Meally (now at Columbia) as his mentor, and Rampersad gives a lot of ink to Ellison's trashing of O'Meally's 1980 book on him; and Jackson mentions Rampersad in only one short sentence in his acknowledgements, while Rampersand ignores both Jackson and Howard University (his employer) entirely in his. I smell hard feelings here.

The verdict? Jackson's is by far the better book. Believe it or not, the access to Ellison's personal correspondence is Rampersad's Achilles' heel. Jackson's book was very good. Having read it (I don't believe Rampersad's "I finished mine in 2003" line for a minute) Rampersad realized that the only original thing he had was the previously closed correspondence. That was mostly family and personal letters (Jackson had already tracked down the literary material in the open files of the other authors) which emphasized the daily petty trials and tribulations of life. So by avoiding the material Jackson covered and using the fresh stuff, most of which was personal and trivial (I mean, he's not going to spend a lot of time writing to Irving Howe about his hemorroids) the book makes Ellison come across as personal and trivial.

The problem isn't that Rampersad wants to do a hachet job on Ralph Ellison, it's that he came in second to the line to a very well done book, and at least for the first half of his subject's life, he doesn't have a lot to add, and the last half of Ellison's life wasn't his best. (However, let's wait for Part II of Jackson's bio.)

Sure, go ahead and buy this book. It's not a heavy read. But I caution you, read Jackson's bio first, or all you'll get is a medicine cabinent view of the man.

This is an elegantly written and well researched biography. Rampersad understands the contexts in which Ellison worked and thought. As Rampersad shows, Ellison was a prickly individual, often haughty and abrupt about many issues. But there is a tendency on Rampersad's part to engage in assassination by adverb and adjective. When Rampersad does not agree with a stance by Ellison, he will employ an adjective or adverb to render Ellison's position a bit obvious or retrograde. All too often, Rampersad concerns himself with Ellison's choice of friends, wondering if he had too many white friends. In point of fact, Ellison's chain of friends linked widely, and he was close to many important black intellectuals. It appears that Ellison simply wanted to be surrounded by fellow intellectuals, especially those who shared his aesthetic sensibility. Throughout the volume, Rampersad takes it as a given that Ellison was wrong not to give support - or that he gave insufficient support - to aspiring black writers. Perhaps he did not, although it is not established by Rampersad that Ellison favored neophyte white writers in anything resembling a consistent manner. He was, as most writers, covetous of his time and also, no doubt, worried about these newcomers overcoming his own reputation. On an interpretive matter, we can look at Ellison as a one-shot wonder with Invisible Man. Yet, I do not think that Rampersad gives sufficient respect for Ellison as a critic, one with a strong sensibility that is both democratic and elitist in various ways. His two volumes of criticism are classics.

Ralph Ellison was a magical writer. A look at his bio only partly explains how he was able to accomplish "Invisible Man," a surrealist existential odysey through Harlem during the Jazz Age. I agree with an earlier reviewer that, now that two extant biographies exist, the previous written by Lawrence Jackson, the two must be looked at side by side. The first, by Mr. Jackson, was written with the much more warm tone of an admirer. Admiration brings one close to the subject in a way that a critical view doesn't. Jackson seems to understand the very jazz rhythms that underpin the prose of Ellison. Rampersad's Ellison is much more petty and pompous. I'm sure both views reflect some of the reality of this complex figure. But as an admirer of Ellison myself, I thought Jackson's book was far more generous and insightful of the man, and the times that gave birth to his masterpiece.

Ellision is also somewhat of a tragic figure, and Rampersad certainly draws this out - he was never able to publish a second novel. Rampersad highlights the mythical fire that at each recounting consumes more and more of the would-be manuscript of a second work of fiction. Rampersad's book is meticulously researched, rich in detail about the later half of Ellison's life. I also agree with earlier reviewers that the essays Ellison produced during this second phase of his career are quite significant, and perhaps not sufficiently appraised by this biographer.

I feel Rampersad is a bit unfair to Ellison in his harping on how much he didn't do during the Black Power era. This is a judgment call - not every African American was wearing a dashiki during those days, and Ellison shouldn't be raked over the coals for this on every other page. It is saddening that he had this distant side to him, but more of an effort should have been made to understand why. Perhaps his and the country's traumatic relationship with communism during the Thirties into the McCarthy era had something to do with how he later tried to separate art from politics. I also suspect that an encounter between the two men colors the book: perhaps Ellison was less than generous with Rampersad when the two met in person for the research on Rampersad's Langston Hughes bio. Perhaps the bad blood continues.

Lawrence Jackson's book is a far better portrait, particularly of the genesis of "Invisible Man." Nevertheless, the scholarship is such in this second bio that it will prove to be an important addition to the understanding of the life of a complex man.

This is IT! The definitive biography of one of America's most complex, brilliant and controversial writers. I fully expected Rampersad to deliver, having LOVED his bios on Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe. I received this as a gift two weeks ago and I devoured it with relish. Rampersad delivers... the scholarship, the lyrical writing, the delicious details that illuminate. Don't dare miss this one.

Ralph Ellison

Reviewed by Charles Shea LeMone www.allwordman.com

The National Book Award in 1953 went to Ralph Ellison for his highly acclaimed fictional novel, Invisible Man--a sometimes satirical look at the alienation, powerlessness and vulnerability of the black man in America. Although he skyrocketed to prominence as the most hailed "Negro" writer of his time, and was paid a hefty advance on his next novel, Invisible Man proved to be Ellison's first and last novel.

The author of this enlightening biography, Arnold Rampersad, does an extremely credible job of delving into Ellison's complex life in a style that is easy to read and digest. From Ellison's days as a poor youth raised in Oklahoma, to his aborted education at Tuskegee, and his early days in New York City, circa the late `30s, Rampersad chronicles the mind and the uncertain times of a gifted yet enigmatic artist who grew to maturity during the Depression.

Like most black intellectuals--at a time when unions excluded blacks and only two blacks were employed by the New York City telephone company--Ellison embraced Marxism. His socialistic beliefs also influenced his writings as a literary critic--which helped launch his writing career. In that capacity, many years before and after Invisible Man, Ralph refused to review the work of other black writers. The one exception was Richard Wright, who had once been his close friend and mentor--and author of the explosively controversial Native Son.

Ellison eloquently slammed a host of young black writers, which included Chester B. Himes, Amiri Baraka and Ismael Reed. Ellison's literary heroes, which he never hesitated to point out, were spearheaded by Emerson, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot. Paradoxically, William Faulkner, the renowned voice of the South, was high on that same list.

Also of note, the author paints Ellison as an intensely self-indulgent and insensitive man when it came to his relationships with his mother and his wife, Fanny. Furthermore, Ralph held rank on numerous committees--too many to mention--yet failed to write a single word of acknowledgment about black women writers such as Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. In fact, it was common knowledge that he adamantly opposed the membership of women of any color to the prestigious, men-only, Century Club in midtown Manhattan.

Rampersad also suggests that Ellison became increasingly bitter as time passed and a new generation of "black power" politically motivated students booed and ridiculed him during his speeches on college campuses. According to a new progressive way of thinking, Ellison was a has-been Uncle Tom and a front-running apologist for America's apathetic approach to racial issues.

More than forty years after the publication of Invisible Man, right up to his death in 1994, whenever Ralph was asked about his novel-in-progress he continually claimed that he was in the process of tying up the loose ends and would be finished soon. Fortunately, Arnold Rampersad was more diligent on this project and did an impressively masterful job in the process.

The publication of INVISIBLE MAN bisects this biography. Those pages that recount Ellison's life before 1952 are fascinating; the book is a real page-turner in the early chapters. After recounting the publication of Ellison's masterpiece, however, the narrative grows somewhat stale. I do not attribute this flatness to any failing on Rampersad's part (his two-volume biography of Langston Hughes is excellent). Rather, Ellison's social aspirations, his endless awards, his (often token) participation on elite committees and boards (inc. Colonial Williamsburg) are among the things that consumed him after INVISIBLE MAN was released. Reading about these aspects of his life was less interesting than learning about his early life in Oklahoma City, his days at Tuskegee or the crafting of his novel. Ellison's achievements as an essayist and his frustration in completing a second novel are the most compelling aspects of the biography's latter chapters. These chapters raise important questions about a writer's craft in general and Ellison's relationship to African Americans and younger African-American writers in particular.

I greatly appreciated the care Rampersad took in portraying the evolving relationship between Ellison and his second wife Fanny and was interested to learn about the couple's residences in Harlem and elsewhere.

Students of literature should find much to enjoy in this informative, thought-provoking biography.