Ralph Ellison (Magill’s Literary Annual 2003)
At a glance:
- Author: Lawrence Jackson
- First Published: 2002
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1914-1953
- Setting: Oklahoma City, New York City, Long Island, and Vermont
- Principal Characters: Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Kenneth Burke, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Fanny Buford
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: African Americans, Civil rights, New York, United States or Americans, Politics, Blacks, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Music or musicians, New York City, Literature, Oklahoma, Novelists, Ethnic relations, Jazz music, Identity, Activism
- Locales: New York, NY, Oklahoma, Long Island, NY, Vermont
Ralph Ellison holds a unique place in American literature. His Invisible Man (1952) changed both the course of the American novel and the understanding of the African American experience, and thus the American experience. Ellison would live more than forty years after that landmark publication (he died in 1994), but he would never publish another novel. (A fragment of his fictional work-in-progress, Juneteenth, was published posthumously in 1999.) Lawrence Jackson has chosen, in this pioneering study of the artist, to focus on the first half of Ellison’s life, from his...
[The entire page is 1919 words long]
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