From the renowned author of Invisible Man, a classic, “elegant” (The New York Times) collection of essays that captures the breadth and complexity of his insights into racial identity, jazz and folklore, and citizenship across six decades.

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this definitive volume includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that Black Americans lead. With newly discovered essays and speeches, The Collected Essays reveals a more vulnerable, intimate side of Ellison than what we've previously seen. “Raph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

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, and eventually winning the National Book Award for Invisible Man. 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.

John F. Callahan is the Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College. Callahan has been the editor or writer on numerous volumes related to African American and twentieth-century literature. As the literary executor to Ralph Ellison, Callahan worked as the primary editor for Ellison’s posthumously released novel Juneteenth.

Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, wrote thirteen novels and numerous novellas, stories, and essays.

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