Synopsis
Published more than a decade after Ralph Ellison's award-winning masterwork, Invisible Man, Shadow and Act is a seminal collection of the late author's essay, review and interviews. The essays, written between 1945 and 1994, run the gamut from literature to art and include Ellison's National Book Award acceptance speech and his influential article on the spirit of Black music, "Blues People." These pieces also address many of the underlying themes of Ellison's ficiton, particulary issues of race and identity. "They represent, in all their modesty," Ellison writes in his introduction, "some of the necessary effort which a writer of my background must make in order to possess the meaning of his experience...These essays are a witness of that which I have known and that which I have tried and am still trying to confront. The very least I can say about their value is that they performed the grateful funciton of making it unnecessary to clutter up my fiction with half-formed or outrageously wrong-headed ideas. At best they are an embodiment of a conscious attempt to confront, to peer into, the shadow of my past and to remind myself of the complex resources for imaginative creation which are my heritage.
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From the Back Cover
Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America.
About the Author
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) was born in Oklahoma and trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936, at which time a visit to New York and a meeting with Richard Wright led to his first attempts at fiction. Invisible Man won the National Book Award. Appointed to the Academy of American Arts and Letters in 1964, Ellison taught at several institutions, including Bard College, the University of Chicago, and New York University, where he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities.
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