“You are hereby warned,” Ralph Ellison wrote to his friend Albert Murray in 1951, “that I have dropped the shuck.” After years of struggle and doubt, Ellison had finished “Invisible Man,” his epic of midcentury African-American life. The novel would win the National Book Award. His life was about to change.
An essential new book, “The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison,” presents this writer in all his candor, seriousness, outrage and wit. Nearly all of these letters are previously unpublished. What brings them alive is that while they brood on the largest of issues — identity, alienation, the political responsibilities of the artist — they’re earthy and squirming with all the vital things of everyday experience.
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