The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

Starred review from December 18, 2023
In this potent compendium, Callahan (In the African-American Grain), Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, updates his 1995 collection of Ellison’s short nonfiction. The entries consider a wide array of topics, including Ellison’s time studying music at Tuskegee University in the 1930s, white appropriation of Black culture, and depictions of Black characters in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, the latter of whom, Ellison writes, “has been more willing perhaps than any other artist to start with the stereotype... and then seek out the human truth which it hides.” Notes Ellison wrote while working on Invisible Man shed light on the novel’s central metaphor: “Whites tend to regard Negroes in the spirit of the old song ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me,’ seldom looking past the abstraction ‘Negro’ to the specific ‘man.’ ” New to this edition are a 1962 talk criticizing the pressure put on writers from marginalized backgrounds to depict characters from their community in a positive light, 1966 congressional testimony about the challenges faced by Black people in Harlem, and a 1970 lecture on American humor. The pieces offer crucial insight into Ellison’s philosophy and fiction, and the social analysis proves he still has much to offer contemporary discussions of literature, history, and race. The result is an intellectual feast. Agent: Kristi Murray, Wylie Agency.