The Cambridge Companion To Ralph Ellison

The Cambridge Companion To Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important
and controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied.
This Companion provides the most up-to-date introduction to this influential and
significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features newly commis-
sioned essays, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays reveal new
dimensions of Ellison’s art radiating out from Invisible Man into new domains –
technology, political theory, law, photography, music, religion – and recover the
compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison’s political and artistic vision. Since
Ellison’s death his published oeuvre has been expanded by several major volumes –
his collected essays, the fragment of a novel, Juneteenth (1999), letters and short
stories – examined here in the context of his life and work. Students and scholars of
Ellison and of American and African-American literature will find this an invaluable
and accessible guide.
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. King's College London, on 01 Oct 2017 at 18:40:59, subject to the Cambridge Core
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
Cambridge Companions Online https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521827817.015
© Cambridge University Press, 2006
THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO
RALPH ELLISON
EDITED BY
ROSS POSNOCK
Columbia University
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521827817
# Cambridge University Press 2005
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2005
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13 978-0-521-82781-2 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-82781-7 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-53506-9 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-53506-9 paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for

the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party internet websites referred to in this book,
and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
CONTENTS
List of figures page vii

List of contributors ix
Chronology xi
Introduction: Ellison’s joking 1

ROSS POSNOCK
1. Ralph Ellison’s invented life: a meeting with the ancestors 11

LAWRENCE JACKSON
2. Ellison and the black Church: the gospel according to Ralph 35

LAURA SAUNDERS
3. Ellison, photography, and the origins of invisibility 56

SARA BLAIR
4. Ralph Ellison’s music lessons 82

PAUL ALLEN ANDERSON
5. Ralph Ellison’s constitutional faith 104

GREGG CRANE
6. Ralph Ellison and the politics of melancholia 121

ANNE ANLIN CHENG
7. Invisible Ellison: the fight to be a Negro leader 137

TIM PARRISH
v
CONTENTS
8. Ellison’s experimental attitude and the technologies of

illumination 157
JOHN S. WRIGHT
9. Female iconography in Invisible Man 172

SHELLY EVERSLEY
10. Chaos not quite controlled: Ellison’s uncompleted transit to

Juneteenth 188
KENNETH W. WARREN
11. Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, and the meaning of politics 201
ROSS POSNOCK
12. Dry bones 217

ERIC J. SUNDQUIST
Selected bibliography and suggestions for further reading 231
Index 235
vi
FIGURES
3.1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Untitled (Rouen, 1929)

# Magnum photos. page 73
3.2 Lisette Model, Reflection, New York, c. 1939–45
# Lisette Model Foundation. Courtesy of
The National Museum of Canada. 75
3.3 UPI Untitled (Harlem After Riot) 1943.
# Bettmann/Corbis. 76
vii
CONTRIBUTORS
PAUL ALLEN ANDERSON in the Department of History and in the Program

in American Culture at the University of Michigan, is the author of Deep
River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (2001).
S A R A B L A I R is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan
and author of Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (1996).
A N N E A N L I N C H E N G is Associate Professor of English at the University of
California, Berkeley and author of The Melancholy of Race (2000).
GREGG C R A N E is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Michigan and author of Race, Citizenship and Law in American Literature
(2000).
SHELLY EVERSLEY is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College,
CUNY and has published essays in American Literary History and
Minnesota Review.
LAWRENCE JACKSON is Associate Professor of English at Emory University
and author of Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002).
TIM PARRISH is Associate Professor of English at Texas Christian University,
and author of Walking Blues: Making Americans From Emerson to Elvis
(2001).
ROSS POSNOCK is Professor of English at Columbia University and author,
most recently, of Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the
Modern Intellectual (1998).
LAURA SAUNDERS is an independent scholar living in New York, where she
is a writer for Forbes.
ix
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
E R I C S U N D Q U I S T is Professor of English at the University of California, Los

Angeles and his most recent book is To Wake the Nations: Race in the
Making of American Literature (1993).
KENNETH WARREN is Professor of English at the University of Chicago and
author most recently of So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion
of Criticism (2003).
JOHN S. WRIGHT is Professor of African American & African Studies and
English at the University of Minnesota, and author of A Stronger Soul Within
a Finer Frame: Portraying African-Americans in the Black Renaissance
(1990).
x
CHRONOLOGY
1913 Ralph Ellison born on March 1 in Oklahoma City to Lewis

Ellison, a dealer in ice and coal, and Ida Millsap Ellison
(b. 1884), a literate daughter of Georgia sharecroppers.
1916 July 19 Lewis Ellison dies at age 39 from a perforated ulcer
after an accident hauling ice. Ida now the sole support of her
two sons, Ralph and Herbert, the latter born the month before
her husband’s death. She is employed as a domestic and hotel
worker. Active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
1919 Ellison family moves into AME church parsonage and Ida
works as a sexton. The church library becomes a favorite place
for Ralph. He begins first grade at Frederick Douglass
Elementary School, a segregated school in Oklahoma City.
1920–24 After leaving the parsonage, the Ellison family lives in a series
of rented rooms and houses, with Ida struggling to make ends
meet. July 8, 1924, she marries James Ammons, a literate
common laborer. He dies a year later.
1927–30 As a member of the Douglass school band, Ellison becomes a
trumpet player during the height of the Jazz Age; Oklahoma is
a mecca of southwestern blues, jazz, and swing and the home
of the Blue Devils band led by ‘‘Hot Lips’’ Page. Immersed in
the music scene, Ellison also pursues his love of literature and
writing. Ida Ellison marries John Bell.
1932 Graduates from Douglass High School where he achieves first
chair as trumpeter in the school band.
1933 Wins a scholarship to the Music School of Tuskegee Institute,
Alabama. Arrives at college with two head wounds after
hoboing on freight trains to Alabama and being beaten by
railway detectives.
xi
CHRONOLOGY
1935 Switches allegiance from the Music School to the English

Department. Tuskegee freshman Albert Murray, who
becomes lifelong friend and influence, admires him from afar.
Discovers Eliot’s ‘‘The Waste Land’’ and begins to write poetry
and study the major modernists intensively.
1936 Leaves Tuskegee for summer, planning to return to gain
degree; heads to New York, arrives in Harlem on July 4. Meets
Alain Locke and Langston Hughes on his second day in New
York. Studies sculpture with Richmond Barthe, works as a
receptionist and file clerk for the psychiatrist Harry Stack
Sullivan. Friendship with Hughes introduces him to left-wing
political and literary circles. Decides to remain in New York.
1937 Meets Richard Wright, who has moved to New York to head
the Harlem bureau of the Daily Worker of the Communist
Party. Wright, who also edits New Challenge with Dorothy
West, invites Ellison’s first book review, and will be the deci-
sive figure in radicalizing Ellison’s political and literary views.
Ellison attends the Second League of American Writer’s
Congress, sponsored by the Party, and hears Kenneth Burke’s
controversial lecture on ‘‘The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle’’;
Burke will become a crucial intellectual influence. Mother dies
October 16 in Dayton, Ohio. Spends the winter in Ohio,
supporting himself hunting and selling quail and harvesting
pears and walnuts.
1938–41 Returns to New York in April. With Wright’s help he is hired
by New York City Federal Writers Project of the WPA to
compile information on the history of blacks in New York and
keeps the job until 1942. Marries Rose Poindexter, an actress
and dancer, in 1938. Begins working as a reviewer for
The New Masses, a major journal of US Communist left.
Declines to become a member of the Party, remains a fellow
traveler. May, 1940 attends the Third National Negro
Congress, a proletarian movement that he calls ‘‘the first real
basis for faith in our revolutionary potentialities,’’ and his
enthusiastic report becomes his first front-page piece in New
Masses. Publishes short stories in New York literary maga-
zines. Wright’s Native Son published in 1940, sells 200,000
copies within three weeks. Ellison hails it in a review as the
‘‘first philosophical novel by an American Negro.’’ Estranged
from his wife by 1941.
xii
CHRONOLOGY
1942 Works with Angelo Herndon as managing editor of Negro

Quarterly, a journal of left-liberal independent critical
thought. Lasts four issues. Increasingly at odds with New
Masses and its Stalinist position. Wright withdraws his mem-
bership in the Party.
1943 Avoids service in the Jim Crow US Army by enlisting in
the integrated Merchant Marines for two years,
working as a sea cook. Continues publishing stories. Meets
Kenneth Burke. Covers the Harlem Riot for the New York
Post.
1944–45 Publishes ‘‘King of the Bingo Game’’ in Tomorrow; he regards
it as his first mature piece of fiction. Meets Fanny McConnell,
who works for the Urban League and had formerly been in
theatre in Chicago. Returns from the war zone in Europe in
April, 1945. Publishes ‘‘Richard Wright’s Blues,’’ his first
major essay, in Antioch Review, which places Wright’s new
bestseller, his autobiography, Black Boy, in the context of a
blues aesthetic. Divorced from Rose Poindexter. Awarded a
fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation to write a novel
about a black pilot in a German POW camp. Soon evolves into
Invisible Man.
1946–52 Marries Fanny McConnell, who becomes his indispensable
partner in life and art. She supports him for the seven years he
works on Invisible Man. Ellison gains additional income from
freelance photography and installing high fidelity sound
equipment.
1952 Invisible Man published by Random House on April 12.
Reaches number 8 on the New York Times bestseller list.
1953 Invisible Man awarded National Book Award on January 27.
Earlier that day meets William Faulkner for the first time.
1956–58 Awarded the Prix de Rome, funding a year’s residency as a
fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Fellowship
renewed for a second year.
1958–61 Teaches American and Russian novel courses at Bard
College. ‘‘And Hickman Arrives’’ published in Noble Savage
(1960), an excerpt from his novel-in-progress that would
remain unfinished at his death. Seven other excerpts would be
published in various literary magazines over the next
seventeen years.
xiii
CHRONOLOGY
1962–64 Teaches writing at Rutgers University. Publishes ‘‘The World

and the Jug,’’ a two-part rejoinder to Irving Howe that
becomes his artistic credo and a classic statement of intellec-
tual freedom. Shadow and Act published, gathering together
more than two decades of his non-fiction prose. Fellow in
American Studies at Yale.
1967 Loses much of the manuscript of his long-awaited second
novel in a fire that destroys his summer home in the Berkshires.
1969 Awarded Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor,
by President Johnson at awards ceremony in the White House.
1970 Awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et Lettres by his
longtime intellectual hero André Malraux, the French minister
of cultural affairs.
1970–79 Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, New York
University.
1978 Invisible Man ranked as the most important American novel
published since World War II in a Wilson Quarterly poll of
American literature professors.
1982 Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man, with new
introduction by Ellison, a major summary of his ideas.
1985 National Medal of Arts.
1986 Going to the Territory, second collection of prose written or
published from 1963 to 1986. The opening essay, ‘‘The Little
Man at Chehaw Station,’’ is one of Ellison’s masterpieces.
1994 April 16, dies in Harlem where he lived for more than forty
years on Riverside Drive.
1995 Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison.
1996 ‘‘Flying Home’’ and Other Stories.
1999 Juneteenth, a fragment of his unfinished novel assembled by
his literary executor John Callahan.
2000 Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and
Albert Murray.
xiv

The Cambridge Companion To Ralph Ellison

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

The Cambridge Companion To Ralph Ellison

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

The Cambridge Companion To Ralph Ellison

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

# Cambridge University Press 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

ISBN-13 978-0-521-82781-2 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for

List of figures page vii

Introduction: Ellison’s joking 1

1. Ralph Ellison’s invented life: a meeting with the ancestors 11

2. Ellison and the black Church: the gospel according to Ralph 35

3. Ellison, photography, and the origins of invisibility 56

4. Ralph Ellison’s music lessons 82

5. Ralph Ellison’s constitutional faith 104

6. Ralph Ellison and the politics of melancholia 121

7. Invisible Ellison: the fight to be a Negro leader 137

8. Ellison’s experimental attitude and the technologies of

9. Female iconography in Invisible Man 172

10. Chaos not quite controlled: Ellison’s uncompleted transit to

12. Dry bones 217

Selected bibliography and suggestions for further reading 231

3.1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Untitled (Rouen, 1929)

PAUL ALLEN ANDERSON in the Department of History and in the Program

E R I C S U N D Q U I S T is Professor of English at the University of California, Los

1913 Ralph Ellison born on March 1 in Oklahoma City to Lewis

1935 Switches allegiance from the Music School to the English

1942 Works with Angelo Herndon as managing editor of Negro

1962–64 Teaches writing at Rutgers University. Publishes ‘‘The World

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen