Shadow & Act [Import] [Hardcover]

Ralph Ellison (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Secker & Warburg; First UK Edition edition (1967)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0436146002
• ISBN-13: 978-0436146008
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,688,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ralph Ellison (1914-94) was born in Oklahoma and trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936, at which time a visit to New York and a meeting with Richard Wright led to his first attempts at fiction. Invisible Man won the National Book Award. Appointed to the Academy of American Arts and Letters in 1964, Ellison taught at several institutions, including Bard College, the University of Chicago, and New York University, where he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars memoirs from a unique brotha, February 23, 2002

By 

Erren (San Francisco, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadow and Act (Paperback)

not merely a statement on being a black man in america, but on being a man period. ellison is not a militant negro nor is he a white man's negro. he is a free spirit who keeps his mind open to art , music, and life. i loved all the essays. he had cosmopolitan background growing up in oklahoma city, the product of middle-class parents. he read all types of literature, not just one kind and became a writer, simply by accident. his true love was his music. the middle third of this book proves this is the essays he wrote about jazz and opera, especially his loving tributes to milton's playhouse and charlie parker. he was a true renaissance man, who never lost the common touch. conquering any challenge that came his way...

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First Class Act: Shadow of a Giant Mistaken for Invisible, February 21, 2002

By 

jack schaaf - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadow and Act (Paperback)

Ralph Ellison, the musician and the author of the extrememly well-conceieved and paced novel "Invisible Man" (a rare instance wherein the plotting falls perfectly in sync with the decsriptive; falling, as with the eloquence and precision of the inernal mechanics into the ornate casing of a timepiece; a statement as much as a parody concering perceptions), here provides many surprises, all attesting to the immensity of his talents and array of his interests: There are articles on Jazz, BeBop, and some of best first-hand renderings upon the scene as it had developed at a period between literal non-accepatnce to a greater receptability; Eliot, as in the author's pechant and interest for the motifs, messages and stylistic of "The Wasteland"; Faulkner and the South; Historic American literary recurrances involving language, rythmic and individual, and some very valuable and erudite selections whose range -both autobiographic and literary- are as indispensable as they are of true merit and eloquence. This edition (and it is a shame there had not been more!), legitimizes the talents and perspectives of a gifted author whose legacy -although saddly never fully realized- shall always stand above any field of the discordant (as in the Wasteland), ringing more true than any pause between a jazz riff's sometimes-disquieting
strains.