A historical guide to Ralph Ellison
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
A historical guide to Ralph Ellison
（Historical guides to American authors）
Oxford University Press, 2004
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Ralph Ellison has been a controversial figure, both lionized and vilified, since he seemed to burst fully formed on to the national literary scene in 1952 with the publication of Invisible Man. In this volume Steven C. Tracy has gathered a broad range of critics who look not only at Ellison's seminal novel but also at the fiction and nonfiction work that both preceded and followed it, focusing on important historical and cultural influences that help
contextualize Ellison's thematic concerns and artistic aesthetic. These essays, all previously unpublished, explore how Ellison's various apprenciceships-in politics as a Black radical; in music as an admirer and practioner of European, American, and African-American music; and in literature as heir to his realist,
naturalist, and modernist forebears-affected his mature literary productions, including his own careful molding of his literary reputation. They present us with a man negotiating the difficult sociopolitical, intellectual, and artistic terrain facing African Americans as America was increasingly forced to confront its own failures with regard to the promise of the American dream to its diverse populations. These wide-ranging historical essays, along with a brief biography and an illustrated
chronology, provide a concise yet authoritative discussion of a twentieth-century American writer whose continued presence on the stage of American and world literature and culture is now assured.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Steven C. Tracy: Introduction
Maryemma Graham and Jeffery Dwayne Mack: Ralph Ellison, 1913-1994: A Brief Biography
Ellison in His Time
1: William J. Maxwell: "Creative and Cultural Lag": The Radical Education of Ralph Ellison
2: Steven C. Tracy: A Delicate Ear, a Rententive Memory, and the Power to Weld the Fragments
3: James Smethurst: "Something Warmly, Infuriatingly Feminine": Gender, Sexuality, and the Work of Ralph Ellison
4: Alan Nadel: The Integrated Literary Tradition
5: Lawrence P. Jackson: Ralph Ellison's Politics of Integration
Illustrated Chronology
Robert J. Butler: Bibliographical Essay - Probing the Lower Frequencies: Fifty Years of Ellison Criticism
Contributors
Index
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