Ellison, Ralph (Vol. 1) - Ellison, Ralph 1914–
Ellison, Ralph 1914–
Ellison, a Black American, won the National Book Award in 1952 for his first novel Invisible Man. He has since published essays, stories, and parts of a second novel. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 11-12.)
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is a series of episodes, but the screaming crescendo on which the book opens—the hero in his Harlem cellar, all the stolen lights ablaze, collaring the reader and forcing him to notice and to hear—is an unforgettably powerful expression, at the extreme of racial experience, of the absurdity, the feeling of millions that the world is always just out of their reach.
Alfred Kazin, "The Alone Generation," in Harper's, October, 1959, pp. 127-31.
Ellison's Invisible Man is comic … almost in spite of its overtly satirical interests and its excursions into the broadly farcical. Humorous as many of its episodes...
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