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Ralph Ellison

John F. Callahan

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison Hardcover – December 3, 2019

by Ralph Ellison (Author), John F. Callahan (Editor), Marc C. Conner (Editor)

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A radiant collection of letters from the renowned author of Invisible Man that trace the life and mind of a giant of American literature, with insights into the riddle of identity, the writer’s craft, and the story of a changing nation over six decades

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

These extensive and revealing letters span the life of Ralph Ellison and provide a remarkable window into the great writer’s life and work, his friendships, rivalries, anxieties, and all the questions about identity, art, and the American soul that bedeviled and inspired him until his death. They include early notes to his mother, written as an impoverished college student; lively exchanges with the most distinguished American writers and thinkers of his time, from Romare Bearden to Saul Bellow; and letters to friends and family from his hometown of Oklahoma City, whose influence would always be paramount.

These letters are beautifully rendered first-person accounts of Ellison’s life and work and his observations of a changing world, showing his metamorphosis from a wide-eyed student into a towering public intellectual who confronted and articulated America’s complexities.

Print length

1072 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House
Publication date

December 3, 2019
Dimensions

6.5 x 2 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0812998529
ISBN-13

978-0812998528
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ralph Ellison is the author of the novel Invisible Man one of the most important and influential American novels of the twentieth century, as well as numerous essays and short stories. He was born on March 1, 1913, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He died in New York City in 1994.

John F. Callahan is the Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College. He has been the editor or writer of numerous volumes related to African American and twentieth-century literature. As Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, Callahan worked as the primary editor for the posthumously released Ralph Ellison novel Juneteenth.

Marc C. Conner is the Jo M. and James M. Ballengee Professor of English and provost at Washington and Lee University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Letters from the Thirties

Ralph Ellison’s letters from the 1930s tell an affecting story of his journey from boy to man. He writes from Tuskegee, Alabama; from New York City; and, in between, from Dayton, Ohio, where, after his mother’s unexpected death, he enters the months of his young man’s moratorium, writing Richard Wright that boyhood is over.

“Geography is fate,” Ellison often said in later life, sometimes swiveling a formidable cigar between his thumb and fingers. Certainly the thirties letters show these three places shaping the emotional and psychological geography he was fated to bring to his life. Tuskegee, home to the flourishing, first-among-equals national black college in the black belt of the fiercely Jim Crow Deep South; Dayton, epitome of small-town middle America, surrounded by woods teeming with game and wild pears; New York, the country’s greatest city, with the “black metropolis” of Harlem within its borders—in different ways each place sharpened the edges of a personality that Ellison associated with the territory in which he was born and bred: the southwestern part of Oklahoma, in particular Oklahoma City.

The young Ralph Ellison who arrived at Tuskegee was a homeboy just leaving home. Still a kid, he was savvy and street-smart about some things, naive about others, especially the false masks and true faces of power. Of the more than fifty letters he wrote from Tuskegee, all but six were to his mother, Ida Bell. (Four were to his younger brother, Herbert, whom Ralph affectionately calls “Huck,” and instructs to “watch your tenses and endings, don’t write fool when you mean fooling or fooled”; one was to his stepfather, John Bell, referred to as “Mister John” or “Mr. Bell,” whom he praises as a generous, much “above the average stepfather”; and a long letter was to Vivian Steveson, his old flame from Oklahoma City.)

“Dear Mama,” he writes his first day at Tuskegee, a salutation that for the next three years alternates only with “Dearest Mama.” His sign-offs on the numerous letters to his mother are not so uniform. They seem to vary according to his shifting sense of self at the moment he is writing. “Your Hobo Son, Ralph W. Ellison,” he wittily signs that first letter. Other sign-offs over the years include “Your son” (multiple times), “Till next time,” “Ralph,” “Your son Ralph,” “Your son Ralph W. Ellison,” “As ever,” “Yours as ever,” more and more often “With love” or “Love,” and, on one occasion, “Be good.”

His first letter contains a list of fourteen items he needs ASAP and unpaid bills he wants his mother to pay in Oklahoma City. There is plenty of rushed chatter, but he does not mention the deep gash he received just above his eye fleeing railroad bulls in Decatur, Alabama, on the last leg of his journey to Tuskegee. That omission belies the frankness that usually marks Ellison’s letters to his mother. For three years at Tuskegee he writes her about his mundane activities; his joys and sorrows, intense and fleeting; his adventures and needs, financial and emotional; and his gradual awareness, in the process of becoming a young man, of the unforgiving nature of the world. He writes with enviable ease about all facets of his life, holding back little, as if writing his mama was a way of keeping faith with himself, especially his feelings.

Not far beneath the conventions of Ralph’s mother-son relationship there is often the strong feel of a steady, abiding friendship. Always his mother, Mama is also a friend-in-trust with whom young Ellison is comfortable—or, if not always comfortable, at least determined to share the flow of his life.

Ralph’s lot at Tuskegee was a difficult one. “You know I travel with the richer gang here and this clothes problem is a pain,” he writes with a larger dash of self-pity than perhaps he realizes. At the same time that he sympathizes with the on-and-off employment and hand-to-mouth existence of his mother and stepfather in the Oklahoma City of the Depression, his letters home are full of appeals for money. He asks for as much as “Mama” and “Mister John” can spare for his band uniform, black drill shoes, winter coat, and other incidental needs and small pleasures: “I have no razor blades, no soap, no haircut, no toothpaste, no anything. I wish you would send as many of these as possible as soon as possible. You could send a box, and you could cook a cake? and send a few sardines etc.”

Reminders of the amount and due date of Tuskegee’s numerous fees and charges usually accompany Ralph’s list of personal needs. Yet, sensing his sacrificing mother’s “Ellison pride,” he also includes details of his activities, accomplishments, and musical performances, especially his occasional solos, ready-made for her to share with family and friends back in Oklahoma City—those he calls “dear folks” in letters and knows are rooting for him to succeed as their native son.

However, what stands out more than eighty years later is Ellison’s candor with his mother about the deeper currents merging with the flow of his ordinary life. Writing to her, he shares his personality along with the point of view he is developing toward the world around him.

Consider his chilling, yet not sensationalized account of brazen, repeated efforts by the Tuskegee registrar and dean of men to compel him to trade sexual favors in exchange for official permission to be away from campus for a week in the summer. “This is just some more of the mess I’ve mentioned before,” he writes his mother in August 1934. “The person trying to study should not be worried and nagged at because he does not consent to prostitute himself.”

Though Ida Bell’s response to her son is not explicit, Ralph’s comments imply she has understood him and he has been comforted by her quiet support for his refusal to accept the abusive conditions imposed on him, even if the consequences are forfeiting privileges that are his due as a Tuskegee student and free person. Other accounts of how power works in the world, written to his mother from Tuskegee and later from New York, foreshadow his “On Being the Target of Discrimination.” Written and published in 1989, this memoir/essay is a riveting, witty account of how in the years after his father’s death, when he was three and his brother Herbert a mere six or seven weeks old, their mother fought Jim Crow by schooling her boys in the power of little conspiracies to resist segregation by pretending to accept its values and conditions.

His letters to his mother also display a disarming honesty and directness about how Ellison sees the young women at Tuskegee. Though not graphic, his observations leave no doubt that, for him, sexual activity is necessary, normal, and healthy. His nonchalance makes clear he feels no need to conceal or evade his experience for fear of his mother’s disapproval.

In the last letter he wrote from Tuskegee in June 1936, he refuses to fudge his diminishing romantic interest in his former Oklahoma City girlfriend, Vivian Steveson, whom his mother continues to regard with favor. “You seem to feel that I miss her. This is a nice romantic way to have things happen: but in this case it’s hardly true to life. There are two or three others who have come my way since she did and I must confess that I miss either of them much more than I ever did miss Vivian, and I would much rather see anyone of them any day than that little lady. You must understand Mama that I don’t feel just as you do about things.”

Other letters are memorable for touching, sometimes amusing, expressions of Ellison’s love for his mother. He closes an upbeat, chatty Christmas letter of 1934 with a play on the nickname he bristled at hearing white men use to her face as a small boy. “Be a good Brownie,” he tells her, tongue in cheek, “and write soon.” And in March 1935, he brags of showing close friends Walter Williams and Hazel Harrison a charming photograph just received from Ida. “The picture,” he writes her, “is the most appreciated thing you have sent since I’ve been here . . . and when you looked up at me from the frame—well I felt very strange, it was the next best thing to seeing you.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; NO-VALUE edition (December 3, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1072 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812998529
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812998528
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.18 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 2 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,087,995 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #265 in Black & African American Literary Criticism (Books)
- #3,114 in Black & African American Biographies
- #4,843 in Author Biographies

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Ralph Ellison
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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.
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Sean Robin

Mind on Fire

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 7, 2020

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This volume is strictly for the Ralph Ellison die-hards. The noted author of “Invisible Man” left behind a trail of other writings: brilliant essays, fragments of a would be second novel, and now we have the gift of his letters to others - his wives, other family meme era, literary associates, and friends.

From the letters we can discern many of his motivations while he worked on his classic novel from the 1940s into the early 50s - his mind was on fire with many things - mastering the literary craft including folklore, as well as delving into sociology, psychology and political science. During the war (where he served as a merchant marine) I to the postwar period and the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement - what we now know was the apogee of American might in the world - Ellison stays abreast of the latest cultural theories, while channeling his own power into fiction and letters.

We learn in the letters of his close correspondence and confessions to his colleague Richard Wright, who serves as an early mentor, friend and ultimately a foil for his own masterpiece. We also learn of his correspondence with other important philosopher intellectuals, such as Kenneth Burke. Not surprising to learn of his awareness “of the young author Jean Paul Sartre” as his novel combines the surrealist and existential energies, as set in Harlem between the wars.

From the letters we learn of many autobiographical elements in the novel, such as Ellison’s initial engagement with Marxism, and his eventual disgust with Left organizations that were unwilling to embrace non doctrinaire perspectives of “Negro” leader's, and whose loyalties to the Black Community seemed to Ellison to be tenuous or ambivalent, as oppose to authentically in solidarity.

Ellison’s own position was complex - very much signed on as a Race Man, and yet trafficking in a rainbow of ideas, perspectives and people not of any sole racial or ethnic group. In his letters he writes of wanting to be the conscience of the entire nation, without losing the specificities of the Black experience of his adolescence- he does not align with the Black Power move to that emerges in his later years - in the end, his contribution is to channel an excellence in the literary arts that does not hue to any party line, but celebrates the individual’s ability to find himself independent of doctrines, but nevertheless cognizant of the histories of the United States. That is to say, he believes in a form of self determination for “the Negro” that is compatible with integration and cross fertilization with members of the dominant group. And he has not laid this faith in the notion that African Americans can be the ones to redeem the founding institutions of American Democracy and Freedom. His mind was on fire as he wrote his letters, in the process of preparing for and later explaining “Invisible Man” and the position of the arts in society.

Here is an excerpt from a 1956 letter he wrote from Rome, to his Tuskegee Alum friend Albert Murray, where he articulates one of his favorite characters - the brassy, rambunctiously defiant, highly intelligent, yet unpredictable Black Man, “But hell, they forgot to bribe the preachers!...Yes, man! But they’re talking sense and acting! I’m supposed to know Negroes, being one myself, but these Moses are revealing just a little bit more of their complexity. Leader is a young cat who’s not only a preacher but a lawyer too, probably also an undertaker, a physician, and an atomic scientist.”

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Amazon Customer

Excellent copy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2022

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Perfect condition. Wrapped in cellophane.

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Jeri

HEFTY book! For serious readers only!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 2, 2020

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Great book! Will make a great gift!

Actually arrived one day (31 hours) later than the "delivered" email stated, AFTER we had attempted to request a claim for non-delivery...BUT (according to Amazon) that is the delivery service problem, BUT it is really also an AMAZON problem, and clearly not the recipient's problem...

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jeffrey r.

Very insightful reading

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 23, 2020

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One feels as if we are sitting in a room with the master himself.

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Pageturner in NYC

Monumental and Irresistible Collection of Ellison's Letters Over Seven Decades

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 27, 2020

Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) completed only one novel in his lifetime, but he was an accomplished essayist and letter writer. In a letter to Richard Wright, he wrote, "Letters come with difficulty." But "there was a time when I was more myself when writing a letter than at any other time." His voluminous correspondence is part memoir and part astute observations on literary and social issues. John F. Callahan, Ellison's literary executor, provides outstanding biographical overviews before each chapter.

Ellison's 1952 novel, "Invisible Man," won the National Book Award for Fiction (besting Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and John Steinbeck's "East of Eden"). But it proved a hard act to follow. Over the next 42 years, Ellison worked on his second novel. "I've got a natural writer's block as big as the Ritz and as stubborn as a grease spot on a gabardine suit," he wrote to Saul Bellow in 1958. At the time of his death, the manuscript ran more than 2,000 pages. ("Juneteenth" was published posthumously in 1999, edited down to 368 pages. An expanded version, running 1,100 pages and retitled "Three Days Before the Shooting...", was published in 2010.)

Ellison's most frequent correspondents include Langston Hughes, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, close friend Albert Murray and his wife, Fanny. Particularly fascinating are the letters he wrote to his wife in the late 1950s during his affair with a married woman. Ellison's letters are as stirring, vital and well-crafted as his published essays and fiction. This is a monumental and irresistible collection.

This monumental collection of Ralph Ellison's letters over seven decades illuminates the writer's personal life, writer's block and astute opinions on social issues and the literary landscape.

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Amazon Customer

Ralph Ellison

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 28, 2020

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I am reading it and savoring it. I love the intimacy.

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