Ralph Ellison in Opposition

"The test of a first-rate mind,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” No one better exemplified that skill than the novelist Ralph Ellison. Born Negro (the term he preferred) in 1913 in Oklahoma City, where punishing Jim Crow racial laws were still observed, Ellison, in his life and work, was able to understand the crushing effect of those laws and of race prejudice generally and still retain a belief in the rich complexity and endless possibilities America life held out to all. Of those writers and thinkers who dwelt on the subject of race in America, Ellison may well have been the most subtle, the most sensible, and, alas, the most ignored.