When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. “You are hereby warned,” Ralph Ellison wrote to his friend Albert Murray in 1951, “that I have ...

"An autobiography through the previously unpublished letters of the renowned author of Invisible Man, with insights into the riddle of American identity, the writer's craft, and his own life and work.

Arguably unique in American literature, Ralph Ellison became nearly as well known for what he didn’t publish as for what he did. His towering achievement, “Invisible Man” (1952), which won the ...

My introduction to Ralph Ellison’s work was exactly how he describes being introduced to his literary heroes. Ellison stated that your “imagination takes off like a jazz musician on a flight of ...

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, Random House, 1,060 pages, $50 I first met the American novelist Ralph Ellison in the summer of 1963, when he gave ...

From Ralph Ellison to Harper Lee, those who made great work in one field — before their creative lives went in a different direction. By John Wogan and M.H. Miller Before he became a writer, Ralph ...

In 1953, Ralph Ellison was the first African American author to be honored with the National Book Award. In his acceptance speech, Ellison said “fiction . . . can arrive at the truth about the human ...

From early drafts to posthumous releases, Ralph Ellison’s fiction and nonfiction reveal different layers of his genius. Some ...

There is a literature dedicated to fire—think of Dante, or Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”—and there is a literature consumed by fire quite literally. A ...

A new children’s biography about famed Oklahoman and "Invisible Man" author Ralph Ellison is now on bookshelves.

NEW YORK — When I began reading serious fiction in the benighted 1950s there were only a few black writers that I was conscious of and read religiously. I pored over the eloquent and moving essays and ...