![]() “At that time, he was hard at work on the book, and he let me read a considerable portion of it-a couple of hundred pages, at least, as I remember. “I shared a house with Ralph in the late fifties in Tivoli, New York, along the Hudson in Dutchess County,” Bellow says. He was not reluctant to publish a piece here and there in literary quarterlies.įor a while, expectations for the book soared. After a few years of writing, Ellison was not shy about showing excerpts to friends like Saul Bellow and the novelist and cultural historian Albert Murray. At the center of the story-as far as we know it from a few published extracts-are the community and the language of the black church and the relationship between a black preacher and a friend who eventually becomes a senator and a notorious racist. By 1955, he had begun a novel set mainly in the South and in Washington, D.C. But at the end of all this lingered the nervous, American question: What’s next?Įllison did not intend to distinguish his career with such an austerity of publication. It was translated into seventeen languages, and the Modern Library produced an edition. Ellison’s rite-of-passage novel absorbed everything from black folklore to Dostoyevski’s “Notes from Underground,” creating something entirely new, lasting, and American. Here and there, critics’ and readers’ polls would declare “Invisible Man” the greatest American novel of the postwar period or of the century. Ellison won the National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et Lettres, a place in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a position at New York University as Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities. Few novels have ever entered the canon so quickly. So great was the celebration in 1952 for his first (and only) novel, “Invisible Man,” that the sound of critical applause, rattling medals, and whispered expectations took years to fade. The man is far too composed, too regal, to betray the weight of it, but the soul must weary of its persistence. Ralph Ellison turned eighty on March 1st, and his peculiarly modern burden, the burden of a second act, grows heavier with age. But very often I’ll start in the morning by looking back at the work from the day before and it ain’t worth a damn.” When that happens, as it does more frequently than he would like, Ellison will turn away and stare out the window, watching the river flow. ![]() I’ll go back to get a sense of its rhythm and see what it will suggest, and go on from there. “The hardest part of the morning is that first hour, just getting the rhythm,” Ellison says. He wakes early, goes out to buy a paper on Broadway, returns, and, when he has exhausted the possibilities of the Times and the “Today” show, when the coffee and the toast are gone, he flicks on the computer in his study and reads the passage he finished the day before. In a modest apartment overlooking the Hudson, at the weld of northern Harlem and southern Washington Heights, Ralph Ellison confronts his “work in progress.” He has been at this for nearly forty years, and rare is the day that he does not doubt his progress. Ralph Ellison poses for a portrait in Harlem, New York, 1966.
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