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Synopsis
Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison’s strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage.
Starting with Ellison’s hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma and his ordeal as a student in Alabama, Rampersad documents his improbable, painstaking rise in New York to a commanding place on the literary scene. With scorching honesty but also fair and compassionate, Rampersad lays bare his subject’s troubled psychology and its impact on his art and on the people about him.This book is both the definitive biography of Ellison and a stellar model of literary biography.
The New York Times - William Grimes
In Ralph Ellison Arnold Rampersad, a Stanford University professor and the author of biographies of Jackie Robinson and Langston Hughes, describes the long, sad descent of a gifted novelist and analyst of black American culture, who, intoxicated by fame and the honors heaped on him after the publication of his masterpiece, Invisible Man, in 1952, grew increasingly aloof from other black artists and detached from black reality.