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American Literature since World War Ⅱ
Ralph Waldo Ellison
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The Twentieth-Century Black Writer
W. E. B. Du Bois Richard Wright Langston Hughes Countee Cullen James Baldwin Alex Haley Ralph Waldo Ellison Zora Neale Hurston Alice Walker Tony Morrison
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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Richard Wright
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Langston Hughes
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Ralph Waldo Ellison
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Invisible Man
This novel was included in the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, in the top 20.
In a poll of 200 writers, editors, and critics conducted by the New York Herald Tribune’s Book Week magazine in 1965, Invisible Man was voted the most distinguished novel published in the twenty years since 1945.
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Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913–1994)
He was born to Lewis Alfred and Ida (Millsap) Ellison in Oklahoma City,Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson.
His father, a construction worker and tradesman, died when Ellison was three, and his mother supported herself and her son by working as a domestic.
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Early Life
Ellison was born on March 1, 1913. Many years later, Ellison would find out that his father hoped he would grow up to be a poet, and named him after the great American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Ellison's mother raised him and his brother Herbert, while working as a domestic and nursemaid.
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Early Life
From an early age Ellison was interested in music and books, and his mother brought home for him from the households where she labored discarded phonograph records and magazines.
Growing up in Oklahoma City, Ellison knew Hot Lips page, the jazz musician, and he was a friend of Jimmy Rushing, the blues singer. In high school, he played trumpet in the band.
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Early Life
Early in life he became enamored of music, studying trumpet and piano. Ellison lived at a time when several great jazz musicians were in Oklahoma City, so he became immersed in that genre of music as well as the classical composition which he studied in school.
Jimmy Rushing would be a particularly strong influence; years later he would include the essay "Remembering Jimmy" in his book of criticism Shadow and Act. Music was a constant theme both in his personal life and in his writing.
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Early Life
Ellison began reading Hemingway in adolescence, and later he became interested in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. “At first I was puzzled when I began to read Ernest Hemingway . . . as to just why his stories could move me but I couldn’t reduce them to a logical system. . . .”
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Early Life
Ellison told Mike McGrady of Newsday (October 28, 1967): “Then I began to look at my own life through the lives of fictional characters. When I read Stendhal, I would search within the Negro communities in which I grew up.
I began, in other words, quite early to connect the worlds projected in literature and poetry and drama and novels with the life in which I found myself.”
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College
In 1933, Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor Charles L. Dawson.
Ellison also had the fortune to come under the close tutelage of the piano instructor Hazel Harrison.
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College
While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent increasing amounts of time in the library, reading up on modernist classics. He specifically cited The Waste Land as a major awakening moment for him.
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New York
After his third year, Ellison moved to New York City to earn money for his final year. He decided to study sculpture and he made acquaintance with the artist Romare Bearden.
Perhaps Ellison's most important contact would be with the author Richard Wright, with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship. After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged Ellison to pursue a career in writing, specifically fiction.
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New York
The first published story written by Ellison was a short story entitled "Hymie's Bull," a story inspired by Ellison's hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee.
From 1937 to 1944 Ellison had over twenty book reviews as well as short stories and articles published in magazines such as New Challenge and New Masses.
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WWII
During WWII Ellison joined the Merchant Marine, and in 1946 he married his second wife, Fanny McConnell.
She supported her husband financially while he wrote Invisible Man, and typed Ellison's longhand text.
She also assisted her husband in editing the typescript as it progressed.
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Major Works
Invisible Man Shadow And Act: Essays Going To The Territory: Essays Three Days Before the Shooting
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Invisible Man
Invisible Man explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1940s.
In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters who are dispassionate, educated, articulate and self-aware.
Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect.
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Invisible Man
The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation.
The groundbreaking novel, with its treatment of previously taboo issues such as incest and white America's distorted perceptions of black sexuality, won the National Book Award in 1953.
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A New Southern Harvest
In 1955, Ellison went abroad to Europe to travel and lecture before settling for a time in Rome, Italy, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest in 1957.
In 1958, he returned to the United States to take a position teaching American & Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth.
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Trading Twelves
During the 1950s he corresponded with his lifelong friend, the writer Albert Murray. In these letters they commented on the development of their careers, the civil rights movement and other common interests including jazz.
Much of this material was published in the collection Trading Twelves (2000).
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Shadow And Act
In 1964, Ellison published Shadow And Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Rutgers and Yale, and continued to work on his novel.
The following year, a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed Invisible Man as the most important novel since World War II.
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the lost manuscript
In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in which he claimed 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost.
This assertion is disproved in the 2007 biography of Ellison by Arnold Rampersad.
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The Lost manuscript
A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man, that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel", and despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book.
Ellison ultimately wrote over 2000 pages of this second novel, most of them by 1959. He never finished.
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Awards
Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969, he received the Medal of Freedom;
the following year, he was awarded the coveted Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, acting from 1970-1980.
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Awards
In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy for the Arts and Letters and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library.
Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medallion.
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Going to the Territory
The following year saw the publication of Going to the Territory, a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and his friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America’s national identity.
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Teaching Positions
Ellison was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, photographer and college professor.
He taught at Bard College, Rutgers, the University of Chicago, and New York University.
Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
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Death
Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994, and was buried in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.
His wife, who survived him, lived until November 19, 2005.
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Heritage
After his death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home: And Other Stories in 1996.
Five years after his death, under the editorship of John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor, Ellison's second novel, Juneteenth, was published.
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Three Days Before the Shooting
It was a 368-page condensation of over 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of forty years.
All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel will be published on June 17, 2008 by Modern Library, under the tentative title Three Days Before the Shooting.
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Invisible Man
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Invisible Man
• One day in 1945, Ellison sat at his typewriter in Vermont, thinking of an ironic joke he had heard from a black face comedian about his family becoming so progressively dark in complexion that the new baby's mother could not even see her. In this vein, he suddenly wrote, "I am an invisible man". He nearly rejected the idea but was intrigued and decided to give it a try. Ellison then spent seven years working on the novel, The Invisible Man.
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Invisible Man
The novel is the story of an idealistic young Negro and the frustrating, humiliating, and often shocking experiences, in the South and in Harlem, that disillusion him.
Hurt and bewildered, he retreats into “invisibility,” holing himself up in an unused Harlem basement and hibernating there until, he hopes, he will be able to reemerge into society with an alternative view of his, and the Negro people’s, identity.
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Invisible Man
The story is told by the hero in surrealistic flashbacks in which wry humor provides the only relief from grim despair, grotesque brutality, and savage violence.
Upon its publication, Invisible Man was greeted on all sides with praise for the poetic intensity of the narrative and only an occasional faulting of Ellison for overwriting and fuzzy symbolism.
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Critical Receptions
Orville Prescott wrote in the New York Times (April 16, 1952):
“Mr. Ellison obviously knows what he is talking about, and it is not pleasant. . . . Invisible Man is tough, brutal, and sensational. It is uneven in quality. But it blazes with authentic talent.”
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Critical Receptions
George Mayberry in the New Republic (April 21, 1952) noted that:
the book was “shorn of the racial and political clichés that have encumbered the ‘Negro novel’.
Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
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Critical Receptions
Although Ellison freely acknowledged his debt to both European and African American literary traditions, he used an astonishing range of African American folk forms in constructing his protagonist's universe.
Critics agree that the influence of Invisible Man on American literature in general, and its role in bringing the blues and folklore into the mainstream of black experience in particular, is incalculable.
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Critical Receptions
In a similar vein H.C. Webster in the Saturday Review (April 12, 1952) observed that “Invisible Man is not a great Negro novel. It is a work of art any contemporary writer could point to with pride.”
Other critics characterized the novel as “dynamic” and “remarkably vivid and compelling.”
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Structure
Prologue Chapter 1—Chapter 25: the story of the
“invisible man” Epilogue
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Prologue
The novel opens with a Prologue describing the depressed state of the narrator, who remains nameless throughout the novel. He is an invisible man, he proclaims, and has taken to living unknown underground, sucking electricity from the state of New York into his many light bulbs that he has hung in his lair. The novel is to be the story of how he came to be in this position.
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Chapter 1
As a young boy, the narrator overhears the last words of his dying grandfather, whose message lingers with him through high school. He is struck with this idea when he is asked to give his college oration to the town's most honored white men. At the fancy ballroom where he attends the occasion, he is ushered into the battle royal with the other boys hired for the evening's entertainment.
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Chapter 1
First however the boys are brought into the room where a naked woman dances. The boys are next blindfolded and pitted against each other in a boxing ring. After several fights, only the narrator and the largest boy, Tatlock, remain and they are told they must fight each other for a prize.
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Chapter 1
The next stage requires the boys to grab for gold coins on a rug which turns out to be electrified. The narrator is finally allowed to give his oration and is awarded a scholarship to a renowned black college.
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Plot Summary
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man chronicles the life of an unnamed, first-person narrator from his youth in the segregated American South of the 1920s to a temporary "hibernation," twenty years later, in a "border area" of Harlem.
From his "hole in the ground," this "Invisible Man" responds to his "compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white" by telling his story.
He begins by attempting to explain his own invisibility: "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
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Plot Summery
The “invisible man ”is an educated young
American black. The white people simply do not see him as a human being. The black boy attends a black college, then is expelled through no fault of his own, and finally drifts to Harlem. There he assumes the leadership, by chance, in a struggle against a family eviction.
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Plot Summery
He attracts the attention of the local Communist Party, joins it, but later rebels against its discipline which is as unacceptable to him as the Black Nationalism he also encounters.
At last he withdraws completely from society, living in a forgotten basement deep beneath an old New York apartment house.
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Analysis
It is developed from a short story that formed the novel's initial "Battle Royal" chapter.
It was Ellison's only novel to be published during his lifetime, and it won him the National Book Award in 1953.
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Analysis
Written in the style of a bildungsroman, or novel of education, the book chronicles the sometimes absurd adventures of a young black man whose successful search for identity ends with the realization that he is invisible to the white world.
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Plot Summery
In the beginning of the book, the narrator lives in a small Southern town. He is a model black student, even being named his high school's valedictorian.
Having written and delivered a successful speech about the requirement of humility for the black man's progress, he is invited to give his speech before a group of important white men.
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Not Another Protest Novel
Ellison states in his National Book Award acceptance speech that he considered the novel's chief significance to be its experimental attitude. Rejecting the idea of social protest, as Ellison would later say, he did not want to write another protest novel, and also seeing the highly regarded styles of Naturalism and Realism as being too limited to speak to the broader issues of race and America, Ellison adopts a crazy style, based heavily on modern symbolism.
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Analysis
Invisible Man is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, an unnamed African American man who considers himself socially invisible.
His character may have been inspired by Ellison's own life. The narrator may be conscious of his audience, writing as a way to make himself visible to mainstream culture; the book is structured as if it were the narrator's autobiography although it begins in the middle of his life.
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Analysis
In the story, the unnamed protagonist sets out on a journey of self-discovery that takes him from the rural south to Harlem.
Learning who he is means realizing that he is invisible to the white world, but by the end of his journey, the hero has the moral fiber to live with such contradictions.
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Main Characters
Narrator (the invisible man) Grandfather The M.C. (master of the ceremonies) Tatlock (the largest boy ) Superintendent (The man who invites the narrato
r to the hotel to deliver his speech ) Mr. Norton (a trustee) Dr. Bledsoe (the president of the college)
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Narrator
The unnamed first person hero of Ellison's novel leads the reader through the progression of events which follow the scene set by the Prologue, allowing us to see into his thoughts, yet never telling us his name.
As his life unfolds, the reader watches him bounce from one group to another, from college to a paint factory to the Brotherhood, where each time he is "included" in the group. As he moves through each group, he always takes on another anonymous name.
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Narrator
Only towards the end is he finally able to throw off all of his cloaks of blind acceptance and conciliation. The state of the autonomy he finds is echoed in the underground life which binds the story in the Prologue and the Epilogue.
Through the narrator, the reader becomes familiar with the other characters who shape and mold his attitudes, justifying his philosophic self-explosion at the end of the novel.
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Theme
Invisible Man deals with themes of individuality, identity, history, and responsibility.
The overwhelming theme of the novel is that of identity. While the novel has to do with questions of race and prejudice, most critics agree that these ideas are subsumed under the broader questions of who we think we are, and the relationship between identity and individuality.
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Style
In his prose, Ellison managed to encompass the entirety of the American language--black and white, high-brow and low-down, musical, religious, and reshape it to his own ends.
In Invisible Man he created one of those rare works that is a world unto itself, a book that illuminates our own in ways that are at once hilarious and devastating.
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Style
Invisible Man may be said to exemplify the paranoid style of American literature. Ellison establish an atmosphere of paranoia in his novel, as though the reader, along with the narrator, "had waded out into a shallow pool only to have the bottom drop out and the water close over my head" . And this style is particularly appropriate to Ellison's subject matter.
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Influence
More than forty years after it was first published, Invisible Man is still one of the most widely read and widely taught books in the African-American literary canon.
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A Visible Man
“This is not another journey to the end of the night. With this book the author maps a course from the underground world into the light. The Invisible Man belongs on the shelf with the classical efforts man has made to chart the river Lethe from its mouth to its source.”
——Wright Morris
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Thank You!
