| Ralph Ellison |
|
1914-1994,
essayist and novelist. As a cultural historian and novelist, Ellison has had
since 1952 an extraordinary influence on European-American and
African-American literature. Born and raised in Oklahoma and trained at
Tuskegee Institute as a symphony composer, Ellison has successfully managed
to reconcile his folk and classical cultural heritages. Before a fateful
Harlem meeting with Richard Wright in 1937, he had already been educated in
the rich oral ethnic forms of his region. Besides the rhythms, imagery, and
poetry of the vernacular, Oklahoma City, a southwestern center of jazz, was
vibrant with the blues during his boyhood. But in school, young
trumpet-playing Ellison was also drilled in military and classical music.
Ellison realized his boyhood dream of becoming a renaissance man. He has been a free-lance photographer, jazz musician, vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a member of the American Academy of Arts, a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and a professor at New York University. He has received such prestigious awards as the Russwurm, the Medal of Freedom, and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. He peppered his conversations, lectures, and writings with anecdotes that revealed his humble origins, professional relationships with celebrated, culturally diverse artists, and a strong sense of bicultural rather than black cultural nationalist identity as an American writer of African descent. More highly respected by his peers than by younger black students and writers, Ellison was as much at home in a Harlem barbershop as in a Harvard lecture hall. In synthesizing the best conventions of his bicultural heritage, Ellison was inspired by Eliot's The Waste Land. It was Wright, however, who discussed the art of fiction with the young college dropout and guided him to Conrad, James, and Dostoyevsky; Wright who introduced him to Leadbelly and Marxism in the same evening; and Wright who acted as midwife for his first publication. Subsequently, on the strength of a single novel, a couple of collections of essays, and nearly two dozen stories, Ellison won acclaim as a major American author and influenced the assumptions and methodologies of contemporary critical theories of African-American literature. The superb integration of surrealism and folklore in his best short stories, "Flying Home" and "King of the Bingo Game," anticipate the irony and parody of his epic novel Invisible Man (1952). In a poll by Book Week, it was judged "the most distinguished single work" published in America between 1945 and 1965. Its complex time structure, spacious setting, nameless ethnic protagonist, allegorical and legendary characters, rites of passage, ironic theme, and ritualistic use of music and language suggest that Ellison drew on African-American folklore and the Western epic tradition to render his vision of the historical odyssey of blacks in America to define themselves. Eight excerpts from a second novel that Ellison began in 1953 have been published in journals; the best of these is "And Hickman Arrives." The most significant essays in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), which sparkle with the same wry wit and wisdom, are essentially cultural and autobiographical. These pieces celebrate Ellison's efforts to reconcile his double consciousness by drawing on his indigenous ethnic culture for standards, role models, and rites of passage. The essays have three general themes: African-American music, the complex relationships of folklore to literature, and those between African-American and European-American cultures. Convinced "that the most authoritative rendering of America in music is that of American Negroes," Ellison argues that the music is a unique blend of European and African cultural expression. And his argument in Shadow and Act that the possibilities for formal literature are infinite for writers who draw on the techniques and spirit of the slave songs, blues, jazz, and black vernacular has had a profound influence on critical studies of African-American literature. Shadow and Act, like Invisible Man, has become a standard college text. source: http://www.historychannel.com/perl/print_book.pl?ID=35078 |