"Professor Lawrence Jackson''s painstaking documentation of Ralph Ellison''s early life and the beginning of his literary career provides a much needed resource for Ellison''s readers and critics." (Horace Porter, author of Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America and Director of African Studies at the University of Iowa) "Lawrence Jackson''s absorbing biography of Ralph Ellison makes a vital contribution to American literary history." (Ross Posnock, English Dept., New York University; Author of Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual ) "Dr. Lawrence Jackson''s remarkable biography of Ralph Ellison is an essential contribution to the scholarship on one of the twentieth century''s greatest writers. Painstakingly researched and exhaustive, this compelling portrait of Ellison clarifies his genius--and his intellectual era--for a new century." (Charles Johnson, National Book Award Winner and author of Middle Passage ) "An eloquently written and exquisitely researched biography. There is nothing quite like it.
Jackson breathes life into those hidden nooks and crannies of Ellison's youth that would later become cannon fodder for the grown Ellison's explorations. An utterly ground-breaking biography, the idea of Ralph Ellison will never be the same." (Jerry Watts, Author of Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life ) Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) earned his place in the canon of African-American literature in a single act, the publication of Invisible Man (1952). His only complete novel, its controlled fury and modernist polish were thought by many to represent both the vanguard and the future of African-American literature. The book''s uniqueness-and its influence on subsequent generations-have made the absence of an Ellison biography conspicuous; this first study by Jackson, an assistant professor of English at Howard University, ably answers that need. Its greatest limitation is that it ends in 1953, only halfway through Ellison''s life. Hence Jackson doesn''t discuss the highly anticipated second novel, the manuscript of which was destroyed in a fire in 1967, and which Ellison spent the rest of his life trying to complete (The fragments were put together by Ellison''s executor and published in 1999 as Juneteenth). Material on Ellison''s early years is hard to come by, and readers will find few of the anecdotes, letters or quotations that make up biographers'' usual stock-in-trade.
Still, these constraints do not seriously detract from the book''s real merits. Jackson does a masterful job of re-creating the environments in which Ellison lived: childhood in Jim Crow Oklahoma, education at Tuskegee Institute, coming-of-age in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison''s intellectual and cultural development is faithfully traced, carefully researched and copiously annotated. Ellison will receive more comprehensive scrutiny in 2003, the projected publication of acclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad''s authorized treatment. Till then, Jackson''s study of the early Ellison does a fine job of shedding light on this enigmatic and revered figure in American letters. Agent, Jenny.Bent. (Nov.
) ( Publishers Weekly , September 3, 2001) Unlike his contemporary Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison was slow to make his grand entry into the literary world. But after working for six agonizing years on his best-know novel, Invisible Man, Ellison burst onto the scene to the thunderous acclaim of critics, winning the National Book Award in 1952. Jackson (English, Howard Univ.) traces the development of Ellison''s life and work from his boyhood in Oklahoma City through his college days at Tuskegee Institute to his slow but steady rise among New York''s intellectual elite in the 1940s and 1950s. Jackson''s detailed and exhaustive study adroitly places Ellison Ellison in the cultural context that formed him intellectually, offering as well a splendid sketch of the benefits and shortcomings of New York literary life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Unfortunately, Jackson''s biography ends in 1953 with the publication of Invisible Man, perpetuating the myth for the next 40 years Ellison produced nothing of consequence. Jackson''s neglect of the brilliant essays in Shadow and Act, Ellison''s dazzling and funky writing on music, and the posthumous Juneteenth impoverishes this book. Still, since this is the first and only biography of Ellison now available, its broad contours will suffice until we get the definite biography.
Recommended for most collections. --Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., Lancaster, PA ( Library Journal , October 1, 2001) IF there were ever a pressing need for a biography of a writer, it would be for that of Ralph Ellison, who left a 40-year project unfinished at the time of his death in 1994. When his second novel, "Juneteenth," was published posthumously in 1999, it was described as a book by Ellison, but John F. Callahan makes clear in the introduction that the work is of Ellison but not by him. Ellison wrote thousands of pages of an untitled work, and Callahan extracted, organized and redacted to give the reading public something called, "Juneteenth." If we are to be fair to Ellison we must do our own digging.
Enter Lawrence Jackson and his rich, meticulous biography, "Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius." Ellison had the saving grace of spirited, proud, ambitious parents who were, in his father''s words, "raising this boy up to be a poet." From birth, Ralph Waldo Ellison seemed marked for distinction. Despite oppressive poverty and the deaths of his father and stepfather, his youth was spiritually and culturally rich. Callahan tells us that "for Ellison, geography, history and the human diversity of Oklahoma embodied the actual and potential if oft-denied richness of the country." Compared with the lives of many of his brethren in the South. Ellison''s life in Oklahoma was one of intellectual privilege and dignity. The black community was prosperous and sophisticated.
The Oklahoma of Ellison''s youth, with all its brutalities, was for Ellison a kind of paradise lost. "Oklahoma was the territory of his dreams," Jackson writes. "Oklahoma would form the signal terrain of the novel Ralph Ellison could never bear to finish." The Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, AIa., gave Ellison a music scholarship, thanks to years of mentorship by Zelia N. Breaux, director of the Frederick Douglass Junior and Senior High School Band in Oklahoma City, whose 25 players were "minor celebrities." Ellison was thinking of himself as a musician by the time he was 15 years old. Tuskegee was a bit of a shock for the young Ralph, who had grown up reading Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen during the school day, drinking in jazz by night and listening to church sermons called "God Is Not White" on Sunday.
Tuskegee was conservative and compliant, full of classical music and literature, and eschewed jazz and folk art as primitive and lewd. When the nine Scottsboro boys were convicted in 1932, Langston Hughes "was appalled to find few conversations, let alone activism," in the halls of Tuskegee. Even in this restrictive atmosphere, Ellison was able to find mentors - a great gift of his. He was diligent and talented with his trumpet, but he knew he was not gifted enough to make it into the ranks of his idol, Duke Ellington. For him, music was less a calling than simply a way of being in the world. And it was jazz that would largely define his writing style. Jackson''s is, curiously, the first biography of Ellison. "Ellison''s active involvement in the socialist left of the 1930''s and 1940''s, the black radical rights movement of the same period and the literary circles around the League of American Writers, New Masses and Partisan Review not only has never been documented before, but has rarely ever been a topic of public intellectual discussion," he writes.
Why this absence? According to the cultural critic Stanley Crouch, one of Ellison''s literary offspring: "Ellison''s impact has come into our national intellectual consciousness very slowly because it had to drill through the rock of pieties - on both the right and the left. He was not easily drafted into movements." Jackson beautifully contextualizes Ellison, whether in Oklahoma, Alabama or New York where he finally fled in 1936, after one imagines, one too many "chapel concerts at evening Vespers." While evoking each of Ellison''s environments brilliantly, Jackson, who teaches English at Howard University, also discusses the influence of "The Waste Land" on Ellison''s young mind. Importantly for Ellison, the poem combined qualities of jazz and the classics, which for the black Victorians had been unbroachable dichotomies." This kind of cultural and psychological insight makes for a very satisfying counterpart. Ellison had planned to study sculpture for the summer in Harlem, but he never returned to Tuskegee. On his second day in New York, he ran into Alain Locke and Langston Hughes who became his mentor immediately.
Hughes introduced Ellison to the high-strung, intellectually demanding Richard Wright and thereby radicalized him. Though Ellison''s politics veered, sharply to the left under Wright''s influence, he was uncomfortable with the rigidity of Communist theory. Eillison preferred the complex blend of Marx and Freud offered by the cultural critic Kenneth Burke. This impulse toward complications would inform Ellison''s art. The biography ends in 1953, following the publication of "Invisible Man," a glorious moment for Ellison after seven years of labor. It is a fitting end for Jackson''s book, whose project is to look at the "emergence of genius" rather than the years of triumph and stagnation. (It will be interesting to see the entire trajectory of Ellison''s life in Arnold Rampersad''s forthcoming biograph.