Most Popular Books by Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison''s impassioned first novel, winner of the prestigious American National Book Award, tells the story of an invisible man simply because people refuse to see me. Yet his powerfully depicted adventures go far beyond the story of one man.

Interviews with the author of Invisible Man and many other works

From the renowned author of Invisible Man, a classic, “elegant” (The New York Times) collection of essays that captures the breadth and complexity of his insights into racial identity, jazz and folklore, and citizenship across six decades. Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this definitive volume includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that Black Americans lead. With newly discovered essays and speeches, The Collected Essays reveals a more vulnerable, intimate side of Ellison than what we''ve previously seen. “Raph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

The radiant, posthumous second novel by the visionary author of Invisible Man, featuring an introduction and a new postscript by Ralph Ellison''s literary executor, John F. Callahan, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson “Ralph Ellison’s generosity, humor and nimble language are, of course, on display in Juneteenth, but it is his vigorous intellect that rules the novel. . . . A majestic narrative concept.”—Toni Morrison In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from New England, is mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Alonzo Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. The reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. “Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying Sunraider. Out of their conversation, and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne in silence for many long years, a story emerges. Senator Sunraider, once known as Bliss, was raised by Reverend Hickman in a black community steeped in religion and music (not unlike Ralph Ellison’s own childhood home) and was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and the Southwest. Together one last time, the two men retrace the course of their shared life in an “anguished attempt,” Ellison once put it, “to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning.” In the end, the two men confront their most painful memories, memories that hold the key to understanding the mysteries of kinship and race that bind them, and to the senator’s confronting how deeply estranged he had become from his true identity. In Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison evokes the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech to tell a powerful tale of a prodigal son in the twentieth century. At the time of his death in 1994, Ellison was still expanding his novel in other directions, envisioning a grand, perhaps multivolume, story cycle. Always, in his mind, the character Hickman and the story of Sunraider’s life from birth to death were the dramatic heart of the narrative. And so, with the aid of Ellison’s widow, Fanny, his literary executor, John Callahan, has edited this magnificent novel at the center of Ralph Ellison’s forty-year work in progress—its author’s abiding testament to the country he so loved and to its many unfinished tasks.

The work of one of the most formidable figures in American intellectual life." -- Washington Post Book World The seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ralph Ellison was not only one of America''s most dazzlingly innovative novelists but perhaps also our most perceptive and iconoclastic commentator on matters of literature, culture, and race. In Going to the Territory, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, along with new perspectives on the music of Duke Ellington and the art of Romare Bearden. He analyzes the subversive quality of black laughter, the mythic underpinnings of his masterpiece Invisible Man, and the extent to which America''s national identity rests on the contributions of African Americans. Erudite, humane, and resounding with humor and common sense, the result is essential Ellison.

These 13 stories by the author of The Invisible Man "approach the elegance of Chekhov" (Washington Post) and provide "early explorations of (Ellison''s) lifelong fascination with the ''complex fate'' and ''beautiful absurdity'' of American identity" (John Callahan). First serial to The New Yorker. NPR sponsorship.

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante-esque landscape of Harlem−"the scene and symbol of the Negro''s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth." Throughout, he gives us what amounts to an episodic autobiography that traces his formation as a writer as well as the genesis of Invisible Man. On every page, Ellison reveals his idiosyncratic and often contrarian brilliance, his insistence on refuting both black and white stereotypes of what an African American writer should say or be. The result is a book that continues to instruct, delight, and occasionally outrage readers thirty years after it was first published.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A radiant collection of letters from the renowned author of Invisible Man that traces the life and mind of a giant of American literature, with insights into the riddle of identity, the writer’s craft, and the story of a changing nation over six decades These extensive and revealing letters span the life of Ralph Ellison and provide a remarkable window into the great writer’s life and work, his friendships, rivalries, anxieties, and all the questions about identity, art, and the American soul that bedeviled and inspired him until his death. They include early notes to his mother, written as an impoverished college student; lively exchanges with the most distinguished American writers and thinkers of his time, from Romare Bearden to Saul Bellow; and letters to friends and family from his hometown of Oklahoma City, whose influence would always be paramount. These letters are beautifully rendered first-person accounts of Ellison’s life and work and his observations of a changing world, showing his metamorphosis from a wide-eyed student into a towering public intellectual who confronted and articulated America’s complexities.

At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind several thousand pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Five years later, Random House published Juneteenth, drawn from the central narrative of Ellison’s epic work in progress. Three Days Before the Shooting . . . gathers in one volume all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published. Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil, the story is a gripping multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of a controversial, race-baiting U.S. senator who’s being tended to by an elderly black jazz musician turned preacher. Presented in their unexpurgated, provisional state, the narrative sequences brim with humor and tension, composed in Ellison’s magical jazz-inspired prose style. Beyond its compelling narratives, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . is perhaps most notable for its extraordinary insight into the creative process of one of this country’s greatest writers, and an essential, fascinating piece of Ralph Ellison’s legacy.

Before Ralph Ellison became one of America’s greatest writers, he was a musician and a student of jazz, writing widely on his favorite music for more than fifty years. Now, jazz authority Robert O’Meally has collected the very best of Ellison’s inspired, exuberant jazz writings in this unique anthology.

“Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., TIME From the renowned author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth is brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise. With a new introduction by National Book Award-winning author and scholar Charles R. Johnson. Here is Ellison, the master of American vernacular—the preacher’s hyperbole and the politician’s rhetoric, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech—at the height of his powers, telling a powerful, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century. “Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying senator Adam Sunraider to the Reverend A. Z. Hickman, the itinerant Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. His history encompasses camp meetings where he became the risen Lazarus to inspire the faithful; the more ordinary joys of Southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker; lovemaking with a young woman in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?

This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion. The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"—each improvising twelve bars of music around the same musical idea-their lively dialog centers upon their respective writing, the jazz they both love so well, on travel, family, the work literary contemporaries (including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway) and the challenge of racial inclusiveness that they wish to pose to America through their craft. Infused with warmth, humor, and great erudition, Trading Twelves offers a glimpse into literary history in the making—and into a powerful and enduring friendship.

''If he only knew what it was, he would fix it; he would kill this mean thing that made Mama feel so bad.'' Belonging and estrangement intertwine in these four lyrical short stories from the the author of Invisible Man. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series,with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York''s underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

"Un home invisible" és una obra clau de la literatura nord-americana que ha captivat els lectors des de la seva aparició l''any 1952. Primera novel·la d''un autor fins aleshores desconegut, va assolir ràpidament un èxit popular enorme, i va rebre el Premi Nacional de Literatura de ficció, fets que van convertir Ralph Ellison en un dels escriptors més rellevants del segle XX. "Un home invisible" és un tour de force enginyós i apassionat. El protagonista anònim de la novel·la''una de les primeres que planteja el conflicte racial des del punt de vista dels negres''és un jove del sud dels Estats Units que es trasllada al nord en ser expulsat de la universitat per a negres on estudia. A Nova York sortirà de l''anonimat, es lliurarà a la missió de lluitar pels drets de la seva comunitat i s''erigirà en un dels seus portaveus, per acabar finalment sucumbint davant la violència i la confusió, mancat de veu i convertit en un home invisible.

Who exactly — them or me — first came up with the idea, I''m not certain. No matter. The Institute for Southern Studies staff asked if I would take out six months to travel the South as a reporter for the Institute''s then-new syndicated weekly column, Facing South. Captive to Southern fondness for poking about the region and to that larger American myth about freedom deriving from travel, I claimed the job before any list of applicants could be gotten up. A new van was purchased and fitted out with a bed, typing stand, CB and regular AM-FM radio, specially cut mosquito netting, and a fan. The Institute''s charge dictated that I''d see the rural South, not too much of the Interstate/urbanized South. Places like Ville Platte, Louisiana; Ink, Arkansas; Ripley, Mississippi; Pickens, South Carolina; and Fincastle, Virginia. The blessings of this constraint came vividly to mind when my path intersected an Interstate cloverleaf in Georgia — typically crammed with service stations, motels and fast food franchises. Over the door of one eatery hung a banner proclaiming "Join the Fun — Eat and Run." All told, I logged nearly 28,000 miles between May and October, 7977. I kept an eye out for the little things. Graffiti, for example. In the rest room of a Charlottesville, Virginia, vegetarian restaurant I found: "Mother made me a homosexual." Below, in another''s writing, "Fantastic! If I bought her the yarn, would she make me one?" Or signs, like one on a New Orleans building: Straight Business College. And listened for larger themes, not at all certain I could hear them — but knowing that these, too, were a Southern tradition going back at least to the days of Fannie Kemble''s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839, the powerful attack on slavery, and William Byrd ''s History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, the travel log some assert first described "the good ol'' boy."

These 13 stories by the author of The Invisible Man "approach the elegance of Chekhov" (Washington Post) and provide "early explorations of (Ellison''s) lifelong fascination with the ''complex fate'' and ''beautiful absurdity'' of American identity" (John Callahan). First serial to The New Yorker. NPR sponsorship. "From the Hardcover edition."

Homme invisible, pour qui chantes-tu ? est un roman de légende. L''homme invisible, c''est l''homme noir dans la société américaine... Voilà trois siècles que, là-bas, il vit, travaille, mange, parle - et pour l''Amérique il arrive même au Noir de se faire tuer... En quelque sorte pour rien. Car aux yeux de l''Amérique le Noir est invisible. Ecrivain lui-même noir, Ralph Ellison a donné ce titre paradoxal, dérisoire et pathétique aux six cents pages qui racontent l''histoire d''un jeune Noir du Sud aux prises avec une société qui lui refuse sa place. Homme invisible, pour qui chantes-tu ? est peut-être le plus insupportable des cris de solitude et de révolte qui se soient exprimés par la littérature.