[Crouch is an American poet, essayist, playwright, educator, editor, and critic. In the following overview of Ellison's life, he relates Ellison's personality, critical reception, and literary aims.]

When Ralph Ellison saddled up the pony of death and took that long, lonesome ride into eternity on Saturday morning, April 16, the quality of American civilization was markedly diminished. He had always traveled on a ridge above the most petty definitions of race and had given us a much richer image of ourselves as Americans, no matter how we arrived here, what we looked like or how we were made. Alone of the internationally famous Negro writers of the last half-century, Ellison had maintained his position as a citizen of this nation. His deservedly celebrated 1952 novel, Invisible Man, his two collections of essays—Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory—the public addresses he gave and what he read and published from the most-awaited second novel in this country's literary history spoke always of the styles, the intrigues, the ideas, the lamentations and the desires that bewitchingly reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans. This champion of democratic narrative wasn't taken in by any of the professional distortions of identity that have now produced not the astonishing orchestra of individuals our country always promises, but a new Babel of opportunism and naïveté, one we will inevitably defeat with a vital, home-made counterpoint.

Ellison had been trained as a musician, intending to become a concert composer. But the books got him and he boldly took on the job of ordering the dissonance and the consonance of our culture into the orchestrated onomatopoeia that is the possibility of the novel at its highest level of success. At every point, he was definitely the Oklahoma Kid—part Negro, part white, part Indian and full of the international lore a man of his ambition had to know. I sometimes thought of him as riding tall into the expanses of the American experience, able to drink the tart water of the cactus, smooth his way through the Indian nations, gamble all night long, lie before the fire with a book, distinguish the calls of the birds and the animals from the signals of the enemy, gallop wild and woolly into the big city with a new swing the way the Count Basie band had, then bring order to the pages of his work with an electrified magic pen that was both a warrior's lance and a conductor's wand.

In our time, there is a burden to straight shooting, and Ellison accepted it. Those troubles snake all the way back to the '30s, when the Marxist influence began to reduce the intricacies of American problems to a set of stock accusations and dull but romantic ideas about dictatorial paradises rising from the will of the workers. Because Ellison had come through all of that and, like Richard Wright, had rejected it, he was prepared for the political bedlam of the '60s. He refused to forgo his vision of democracy as an expression of high-minded but realistic courage, one that demanded faith and vigilant engagement. His tutoring by blues musicians and the world of blues music had given him a philosophical ease in face of the perpetual dilemmas of human existence. What he wrote of Afro-Americans at their best expressed his own sensibility as surely as the tar of that deceptively silent baby stuck to Br'er Rabbit:

There is no point in complaining over the past or apologizing for one's fate. But for blacks, there are no hiding places down here, neither in country or city. They are an American people who are geared to what is and who yet are driven by a sense of what it is possible for human life to be in this society. The nation could not survive being deprived of their presence because, by the irony implicit in the dynamics of American democracy, they symbolize both its most stringent testing and the possibility of its greatest human freedom.

The most stringent testing that Ellison himself had to face was the rejection of his stance and his work by the intellectual zip coons of black nationalism. The Oklahoma Kid took every emotional and psychological blow thrown at him; he didn't submit to the barbarian gate-rattlers who intimidated so many into accepting a new segregation as a form of self-expression and ethnic authenticity. He knew that segregation was never less than an instrument of cowardice and rejected it. Those sufficiently misled tried to drum Ellison all the way out of the Afro-American experience and were not beyond calling him names to his face.

They didn't know they were messing with the wrong man. The writer had the same kind of leathery hide possessed by those dusky Western demons who broke horses, drove cattle and wore the scars left by arrowheads and desperado bullets. Fanny Ellison, his wife of forty-eight years, recalled a luncheon where the embattled novelist sat next to one of the black power literary stooges so anxious to bring him down. Ellison said to him, "I'm a street boy; I'm mean, and I have a dirty mouth." It was an announcement of his essence and a declaration of war.

Ellison wasn't a street boy like the ones who sell pornographic novelties under the banner of rap, their nihilism made superficially complex by the editing and overlaying processes of the recording studio. He was from the same spiritual corner as Louis Armstrong, who knew of cutting and shooting but had danced in the gutter while doggedly staring at the stars. He was also of Duke Ellington's persuasion, an artist bent on the democratic eloquence that speaks most indelibly through the tragicomic resolution of the primitive and the sophisticated. Citing the peerless bandleading composer and the great trumpeter in "Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday," Ellison clarified once more his aesthetic vision of how artistic quality both added to the social promise of the nation and helped protect it against vernacular demons:

Even though few recognized it, such artists as Ellington and Louis Armstrong were the stewards of our vaunted American optimism and guardians against the creeping irrationality which ever plagues our form of society. They created great entertainment, but for them (ironically) and for us (unconsciously) their music was a rejection of that chaos and license which characterized the so-called jazz age associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and which has returned once more to haunt the nation. Place Ellington with Hemingway, they are both larger than life, both masters of that which is most enduring in the human enterprise: the power of man to define himself against the ravages of time through artistic style.

Sneering at the tedious political pulp that would shrink Negro experience to no more than a social soap opera, the Oklahoma Kid, cigar in his teeth and fingers at his keyboard, strove to make his knowledge of race in conflict and confluence a wildly orchestrated metaphor for all of human life. He sought combinations of the concrete and the mythic, the excitement of intricate ideas and the boisterous flare-ups of fantasy. Ellison was too sophisticated to stumble into the dungeon of "magic realism," feeding on surreal hardtack and water. Like the Alejo Carpentier of Reasons of State, Ellison knew that the fusions and frissons of race and culture in the Western Hemisphere supply all that is needed for an unforced way out of convention. The miscegenated multiplications of human meaning and effort allow shocking syncopations of fictional narrative and endless variations on hilarity, horror and inspiration.

The Oklahoma Kid told one writer that craft was an aspect of morality and that is perhaps why his unfinished novel took so long, even given the incineration of a manuscript near completion in the middle '60s. His ambition might have gotten the best of him. Ellison refused to say when he thought he would finish the book. This led some to assert that he was some sort of a coward who couldn't face the possibility that the novel might not be up to snuff, that critics with sharpened teeth might gnaw at it like wild dogs, that a second novel might prove the first no more than a fluke. Those who heard him read from the manuscript during the early and middle '80s doubted the skeptics. What Saul Bellow wrote of Invisible Man in 1952 was still quite true:

I was keenly aware, as I read this book, of a very significant kind of independence in writing. For there is a "way" for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian "ways." Mr. Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone.

At Baruch College in 1983 he delivered a lecture titled "On Becoming a Writer," stressing the freedom from the limitations of segregation that reading granted. Around 1924 books from the downtown library were jammed into a pool hall in the Negro section of Oklahoma City. As older men told tales, laughed and gambled, the young Elli-son investigated the unalphabetized books, which meant that a volume of fairy tales might be right next to a volume of Freud. While the books took him into worlds much broader than those he then knew, they also made it possible for him to better appreciate the contrasting humanity of a state in which a large number of whites and Negroes had facial features and skin tones affected to greater or lesser degrees by Indian blood. Ellison's Oklahoma City was informed as much by those formally educated as by jazz musicians like Lester Young and Charlie Christian, who took innovative positions in the band battles and jam sessions of the era. Local aspirations were extended by the precedents of college-educated Negroes from the Eastern Seaboard who took on the missionary goal of traveling and educating their less fortunate brethren after the smoke of the Civil War cleared and the spiritual lion of freedom was roaring at the social limitations imposed by racism. The message of the lecture was that the shaping of language and the comprehension of it amplified that roar in the soul of the young Oklahoma Kid, allowing him to do battle with the riddles of human life and affirm the victories evident in the verve of Negro culture.

In later readings given at the Library of Congress, The New School and the Sixty-Third Street YMCA in Manhattan, Ellison made it clear who he was. Whether or not the novel ever reached publication, each time he gave public voice to his words, those writers in attendance had an opportunity to witness just how big a lariat the old master was twirling. With Invisible Man, he brought the resonance of genius to his variations on the Southern themes of racial misunderstandings and the disillusionment with Northern radicalism found in the full text of Richard Wright's American Hunger. The later work made it clear that he had advanced upon his initial ambitions and raised what was already a richly ironic style to a level of Melvillian complexity.

Taken by his readings, this writer looked up everything Ellison had published from the work-in-progress, some of it dating back to 1960. One of the themes was corruption and its charisma. A prominent character was a Southern senator named Sunraider. His tale was perfectly Ellisonian. A very light-skinned Negro or a white child who somehow found himself part of a traveling revival unit of Negroes, Sunraider, then known as Bliss, was "brought back from the dead" before various tent congregations. Leaving his background and misusing the lessons of his mentor, the Negro preacher Hickman, Bliss went into politics, changed his name and became famous for the public speaking he had learned at the knees of black people.

In "Hickman Arrives," the wounded Sunraider lies in the hospital after an assassination attempt, dreaming about his past, recalling himself nervously sucking air through a rubber tube inside a coffin as Hickman whipped up the congregation in the tent. But caught by the spirit, Hickman goes on longer than usual. Bliss is awestruck by the spontaneous eloquence as he trembles inside the wooden cigar. Chaos takes over the counterfeit Lazarus routine when a white woman claiming to be Bliss's mother bursts into the act. The hypnotic corruption at the center of the revival meeting, the fooling people for their own good and to prove the greatness of God, is a tool Bliss uses quite differently when he becomes a pro-segregation senator. Nothing is ever simple in Ellison, nor is his vision naive. In essence, Ellison was saying that Negroes, because of their charismatic relationship to American culture, have the moral responsibility to use their gifts with as much integrity as possible. Otherwise, they might unintentionally contribute to the disorder that always pushes at our culture's borders.

If the novel ever appears, good; if it doesn't, Ellison's contribution to the higher possibilities of our society won't be diminished. He outlasted two generations of attackers, the white and black writers and critics who hated Invisible Man and those from the black power era who found him too "white," too "European," too "middle-class." With each passing year his already published rendition of American life grew stronger and his work spoke ever more accurately of what came to pass—the fluid shifts of social position, the tragedies of corruption, the unpredictable turns that pivot on our technology and on how we interpret our heritage as improvising Americans, people whose roots stretch into Africa, Europe, Asia and both directions in this hemisphere; people who remake sometimes perfectly and sometimes too swiftly; people who will never realize their potential unless we take on the challenge of democratic recognition, of understanding that both good and evil, folly and corruption, excellence and mediocrity can come from any place in the society. Ralph Ellison, the Oklahoma Kid, knew that we can never count on closed theories, on limiting explanations of our history—or any history. The only thing we can count on is the chaos that ever threatens our humanity and the willingness the best of us have to stand up to it. When we get lucky, as we Americans have so often, people like Ralph Ellison rear the hooves of their horses up toward the sky, then charge, taking every risk necessary to sustain the vitality of our civilization.