Ralph Ellison (1913‐1994) is perceived not incorrectly as the author of a very important novel, Invisible Man (1952). In addition, there are two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), plus a novel destroyed in a fire that he was working on at the time of his death. Ross Posnock's collection contains, in addition to his “Introduction: Ellison's joking” (pp. 1‐10), and contribution “Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, and the meaning of politics”, (pp. 201‐16), 11 other essays focusing upon diverse aspects of Ellison's achievement. There is a detailed Chronology, (pp. xi‐xiv) revealing that Ralph Ellison was “born on March 1 in Oklahoma City to Lewis Ellison, a dealer in ice and coal, and Ida Millsap Ellison (1844‐1937), a literate daughter of Georgia Sharecroppers” (p. xi). Ellison's father died from a perforated ulcer following an accident hauling ice, when Ralph was just three years old. Brought up by his mother, who twice remarries, in Oklahoma, in 1932 Ralph Ellison graduates from High School having achieved success as a trumpet player. After spending three years at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and switching from music to English, he leaves for New York and Harlem where he remains. Helped by Richard Wright he becomes a reporter for radical journals and newspapers. Following service in the integrated Merchant Marines from 1943 to 1945 he marries a year later Fanny McConnell who supports Ellison whilst he writes Invisible Man. Published in 1952 this reaches number eight on the New York Times bestseller list and in 1953 won the National Book Award. He teaches creative writing at Bard College and Rutgers University.
In 1969 President Johnson awards Ellison the Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour. From 1970 to 1979 he is a named Professor at New York University. The thirtieth Anniversary of Invisible Man is marked in 1982 with Ellison's fresh introduction summing up his ideas. Four years later, Going to the Territory, containing prose composed between 1963 and 1986, is published. In 1995, following his death in Harlem, Ellison having lived in the same place for 40 years, the Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison are published. This reprinted earlier work and added to it. A year later Flying Home and Other Stories appeared. In 1999, Juneteenth, his unfinished novel, is published and in 2000 Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison to Albert Murray. The latter, a life‐long friend, was a classmate of Ellison at Tuskegee Institute in 1935.
These are the bare bones of the life and work of the author of Invisible Man, “ranked (in 1978) as the most important American novel published since the Second World War in a Wilson Quarterly poll of American literature professors” (p. xiv). These professors are the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. The author's contemporary relevance is the subject of Ross Posnock's “Introduction: Ellison's joking”. Lawrence Jackson's “Ralph Ellison's invented live, a meeting with the ancestors” (pp. 11‐34) and Laura Saunders' “Ellison and the Black Church: the Gospel According to Ralph” (pp. 34‐55), assesses the complicated relationship between Ellison's inner self, his “intimate live” (p. 29) and external influences at work. This is also the subject of Sara Blair's “Ellison, photography, and the origins of invisibility” (pp. 56‐81) accompanied by three black and white illustrations. Another influence is the subject of Paul Allen Anderson's “Ralph Ellison's music lessons” (pp. 82‐103). The complex terrain of “The relation between aesthetics and politics in Ralph Ellison's work” (p. 104) is the concern of Gregg Crane's “Ralph Ellison's constitutional faith” (pp. 104‐20).
A reading of Invisible Man is the subject of Anne Anlin Cheng's “Ralph Ellison and the politics of melancholia” (pp. 121‐36). Tim Parrish writes on “Invisible Ellison: the fight to be Negro leader” (pp. 137‐56) and John S. Wright on “Ellison's experimental attitude and the technologies of illumination” (pp. 157‐71). Shelly Eversley is concerned with “Female iconography in Invisible Man” (pp. 172‐87) and Kenneth W. Warren with “Chaos not quite controlled: Ellison's uncompleted transit to Juneteenth, the manuscript destroyed by fire” (pp. 188‐200). In the final essay in the collection, “Dry bones” (pp. 217‐30) Eric Sundquist notes that Ellison is “the author of one of the very best novels in all of American literature and one of the important essayists in the modern world … He remains the most acute analyst of the American riddle of race” (p. 228).
The collection concludes with a Selected bibliography and suggestions for further reading (pp. 231‐4). There is also a selective Index (pp. 235‐7) to this comprehensive addition to the Cambridge Companions series. Inevitably some of the contributions to the Ellison volume are more opaque than others, but there is something here for most students of post‐Second World War American literature, culture, society, and ethnicity. My paperback review copy is firmly bound and clearly printed. In short, all literature and humanities collections should purchase this fascinating volume.
