American Decades
"Richard Wright's Blues"
Book review
By: Ralph Ellison
Date: 1945
Source: Ellison, Ralph. "Richard Wright's Blues." In Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995, 128–133. Originally published in The Antioch Review, Summer 1945, 128–133.
About the Author: Ralph Ellison (1914–1994), a novelist and essay writer, was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama on a music scholarship but soon turned to writing fiction. He moved to New York where as an editor for the New Masses he wrote influential essays, book reviews, and short stories. His novel Invisible Man (1952) established him as one of the foremost African American intellectuals in the years immediately following World War II (1939–1945).
Introduction
Ralph Ellison's friend and fellow novelist Richard Wright is the...
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1940's The Arts Primary Sources
- "The Aims of Music for Films"
- "The Irresponsibles"
- Speech on the Dedication of the National Gallery of Art
- "I Got it Bad (and that Ain't Good)"
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
- "The Life of John Brown" Series, No. 17
- What Is Modern Painting
- On the Town Caricature
- "Richard Wright's Blues"
- The Iceman Cometh
- "What Hollywood Can Do"
- "The Gangster As Tragic Hero"
- "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?"
- William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
- "The American Theatre"
- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgments
