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...book immediately secured author the position that he had longed for; Ellison became known as a dapper and eloquent speaker, invited to give a steady stream of lectures on his own work and that of others, as well as to pass comment on American culture at large. But as decades passed without a second novel, it began to seem as if he were more invested in being known as one of the country's great writers than in writing itself. On CBS radio in 1953, Ellison was sounding notes about a successor to Invisible Man; he was still being asked about that successor on NBC's Today show thirty-three years later.
Arnold Rampersad reveals Ralph Ellison's life as proceeding in two parts: first, as the story of his diligent development as a novelist, which culminated on April 14, 1952, the day Invisible Man was published; and second, as the story of his willing elevation into a public figure, which ended on April 16, 1994, the day Ellison died in his Riverside Drive apartment, a grand old man of American letters, about whom Saul Bellow declared, "In what he did, Ralph had no rivals." When one compares Bellow's career with Ellison's, Bellow's estimation is, as Rampersad puts it, "full of genuine praise and slickly backhanded." Invisible Man and The Adventures of Augie March respectively won the 1953 and the 1954 National Book Award, but thereafter, despite the writers' marked similarities--both wryly ambitious, both well-read if not well-born, and both keen on the peculiar combination of vitality, comedy, and tragedy that runs through the heart of American life--their outputs diverged, radically so. Although Ellison was always a slow writer, his pace was also impeded by his weakness for public attention when it was admiring or lucrative, and his penchant for controversies when they suited his taste.
Born in Oklahoma City in 1913, to a father whose plans for his son were signaled by naming him Ralph Waldo, Ellison would later regard his name as an indication of his personal potential, his wider responsibilities, and the major source of his intellectual, moral, and patriotic energy. This source wasn't just Emerson but the great flowering of American thought and creativity that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, the legacy of which, Ellison would hold, modern America had mostly squandered, and which he, writing about black America's experience, sought to recover. As a boy, however, he wasn't fond of his heavy moniker; and indeed, there wasn't much in his childhood to be fond of. His father's death, when he was three, left him, his brother, and his mother in a state of advanced poverty that Ida Ellison's many efforts never overcame.
Eventually, out of necessity as much as romanticism, Ellison hoboed his way to Alabama, where he entered Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute with plans to become a musician. Beginning in 1933, his three years at the school led Ellison to great books and high culture; on a band trip to Chicago, Rampersad notes, "he attended his first opera...
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