On the Secret Joke at the Centre of American Identity
Michael Rogin: Ralph Ellison, 2 March 2000
Juneteenth
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callaghan.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, December 1999,0 241 14084 6 Show More
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callaghan.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, December 1999,
“... Ellison responded that he was giving his life to the novel. The burden he was bearing was the weight of an unfinished masterpiece, not the guilt of failing to produce political manifestos. But it turned out not to be so easy to separate the literary from the political vision. Between the politics he renounced and the fiction whose single triumph he could ... ”