Shortly after the publication of Native Son, literary critics began to assume that Richard Wright was the head of a group of authors who emulated his literary style. Critics of the 1940s and 1950s included in this group, which they dubbed “The Blues School” or “The Wright School of Postwar Negro Fiction,” authors like Chester Himes, Ann Petry, and, prior to the publication of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. This chapter will throw a new perspective on the relationship between Ellison and Wright, by investigating how Ellison positioned himself vis-à-vis the critical claim that he was a member of “The Wright School.”

The political significance of Invisible Man’s literary aesthetics has long been contested. In the dominant narrative, Ellison is a model minority endorsing ‘vital center’ liberalism and anticommunism; revisionary scholarship has insisted on a muted but nonetheless influential relationship to the Left. Regardless, debates have consistently reproduced readings that submit to Cold War ideological imperatives. By tracking this critical genealogy and its limitations from the 1950s to the present, and incorporating recent theorizations of ‘black interiority,’ this chapter recasts the political significance of Ellisonian aesthetics—a project dedicated not to confirming, but rather dissenting from the Cold War’s hegemonic political binary.

Fanny McConnell Ellison’s influence threads throughout key literary and political milieus of twentieth century America. Educated at Fisk University and the University of Iowa, she was a columnist and writer for The Chicago Defender, founder of The Negro People’s Theater in Chicago, and political and Civil Rights activist before meeting Ralph Ellison, whom she later married, in 1946. Her income materially supported the couple while Ralph wrote Invisible Man, which Fanny (among others) helped edit. Her editorial advice on Ralph’s manuscripts as well as her care for his papers after his death substantially influenced his literary legacy.

In his essay “The Golden Age: Time Past,” Ralph Ellison does not disguise his distaste either for bebop music or for “the sharp, ugly…rebellion” bop’s pioneers were waging against the formal conventions of folk jazz and the Blues. Rather than conclude, as Robert O’Meally does, that Ellison was “deaf to virtually all jazz beyond Basie and Ellington,” this chapter re-contextualizes Ellison’s criticism of bebop an extension of his philosophy of temporality. Ellison believed that one’s experience of time determined one’s understanding of history, and bebop, which formalizes a discontinuous sense of time, clashed with his durational view of the past and its bearing on the present.

This chapter will survey the critical reception of Ellison’s second novel from the time its first excerpt was published as a short story in 1960. It will explore critical responses to the excerpts Ellison published (1960-78), to Juneteenth (1999), and to Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010), taking note of dissenting and celebratory approaches in literary media, while taking stock of scholarly trends and important scholarly articles. This chapter will approach Ellison’s post-Invisible Man fiction—an archive unto itself—in terms germane to understanding Ellison’s cultural vision and humanistic project, delineating lines of thought that recognize its puzzle-like qualities as well as its mediation on American racial history.

Ralph Ellison was still determined to become a composer of symphonies when he met Morteza Sprague, a professor of English at Tuskegee Institute. Sprague, who helped modernize Tuskegee’s literature curriculum, was a major influence on Ellison’s reading and future trajectory. Little has been published about the nature, depth, and longevity of their relationship. This chapter will narrate their relationship with the goal of providing context for why Ellison would dedicate Shadow and Act (1964) to Sprague, whom he called “A Dedicated Dreamer in a Land Most Strange.”

This chapter provides a select overview of critical responses to Ellison’s two essay collections —Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986)—since their publication. The essays were important in the evolution of American Studies (through R.W.B. Lewis’s reaction) and the development of Jazz Studies; the jazz essays were excerpted into the volume Living with Music, edited by Robert O’Meally (2001). For critics such as Eric Lott, Hortense J. Spillers, Kenneth Warren, and David Bromwich, the collections expand on thematic concerns regarding art, politics, and race introduced in Invisible Man (1952). These and other critics reflect on the importance of these chapters for thinking about race and literature, identity and culture, laughter, music, and other topics.

While Ralph Ellison was waiting for Invisible Man to be published, he confessed to Albert Murray, that he was haunted by “embarrassing” dreams of “Tuskegee [. . . ] all the scenes of test and judgment.” Although the novel is not an autobiography but “near allegory” as Ellison once called it, critics, while acknowledging the importance of his years at Tuskegee, have tended to flatten the complexity of one of the hero’s greatest “tests” – the Southern black college. Drawing upon biographers Lawrence Jackson and Arnold Rampersad, the Tuskegee University Archives, and Ellison’s own words, his fiction as well his correspondence and interviews, this chapter will explore how large Tuskegee looms in Ellison’s life and work: the Institute meant far more to Ellison’s development as an artist than simply to serve as one more windmill at which the quixotic hero of Invisible Man must tilt.

This chapter examines the two major biographies published on Ralph Ellison since his death in 1994. Lawrence Jackson’s Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002) and Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison (2007) present vastly different portraits of Ellison’s achievement. Where Jackson’s presentation of Ellison’s life and achievement is largely triumphant, Rampersad sees Ellison’s life as a disappointment. At stake is not simply differing interpretations regarding the life of a major novelist or the merit of his work, but the need to grapple with the still contested meaning of Ellison’s life as a representative black intellectual in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.

This chapter surveys Ellison’s complex relationship with other key Modernist writers, as expressed both explicitly in his letters and chapters, and implicitly in his short stories, in Invisible Man, and in Three Days Before the Shooting … . Examining key moments in his intellectual formation, such as his encounters with Eliot and Joyce during his undergraduate studies at Tuskegee, it also maps out the paradox of his attested admiration for but rare intertextual dialogue with Hemingway, and his ambivalent and shifting positions on Faulkner. Lastly, it suggests that despite Ellison’s and Morrison’s mutual and clearly voiced antipathy, these two writers have far more in common, particularly in terms of their conceptions of Modernism, than either would like to admit. Throughout my overview, I will take account of the best pre-existing scholarship on this subject.

This chapter examines the period between the publication of Invisible Man and the early 1970s (roughly the period defined by the Civil Rights movement) when Ralph Ellison crafted his strategy for how he would define and occupy the public role he found himself and his work suddenly placed. While Ellison is sometimes seen as being politically distant, particularly relative to the Civil Rights movement, the chapter argues that the counter-narrative that Ellison constructed and maintained was that it was his art itself that defined a political stance rather than the other way around. For Ellison, politics discouraged the production of true art rather than stimulated it. During the Civil Rights years, Ellison employed this thinking to move away from focusing on the unique historical experiences of African Americans to a broader emphasis on cultural hybridity.

In his 1945 essay, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Ralph Ellison defines the blues as “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” “Ralph Ellison and the Blues” will examine the ways in which Ellison frames the blues as a quintessentially American form in which its makers tell individual stories that resonate for the collective, while simultaneously creating improvised, self-fashioned American identities. This chapter will consider Ellison’s engagement with the blues through his character Jim Trueblood in Invisible Man; his incisive recollections about Jimmy Rushing, and other blues people; and his own cohered identity created out of (American) cultural chaos.

Ellison’s first collection of essays, Shadow and Act, contains several of the most important pieces in the canon of jazz writing, and first and foremost among them are those based on his childhood and adolescence in Oklahoma City. It was there that Ellison was encouraged by many of the men who were to become iconic national figures and have a profound influence on the music: Lester Young, Charlie Christian, Hot Lips Page, and Jimmy Rushing. This chapter will explore not only the way that Ellison captured the particularities of their Southwestern swing, but also how it may have influenced his writing style.

A rich body of recent scholarship has commented on the depth of Ellison’s engagements with major developments in sociology and psychology, including direct engagements with the work of Robert Park, John Dollard, Gunnar Myrdal, and the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem. Ellison showed a sustained interest and concern with the new prominence of sociology and psychology in mid-century policy decisions in the U.S. Accordingly, his fiction and chapters consistently engaged with these disciplines’ claims to knowledge of African American culture as compared with other ways of knowing, such as naturalist fiction, Marxist analysis, music, and folklore.