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“... to anti-racist movements. At one point, Franklin describes the way Hyman and Jackson encouraged Ralph Ellison, a friend, to write when he didn’t yet trust his talent. (An earlier biography of Jackson by Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons, takes a chattier approach and relies heavily on anecdotes provided by Jackson’s North Bennington neighbours and ...”

“... lives of Black artists, diplomats, writers and other extraordinary figures who lived in the city. (Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright were also supported by the programme, though McKay was never close to either.) FWP resources allowed McKay to produce Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), a sociological study of cults, occultists and street-corner orators that ...”

“... the first person to state that Huck’s voice is, in crucial ways, at least partly black. In 1970, Ralph Ellison claimed ‘the black man [was] a co-creator of the language that Mark Twain raised to the level of literary eloquence ... without the presence of blacks, the book [Huckleberry Finn] could not have been written. No Huck and Jim, no American ...”

“... life without being bothered by women and non-whites; the rare outsider they listened to, such as Ralph Ellison, concluded, as Greif points out, that universal humanity in a universal history ‘makes ruined buildings, and dead men’. Greif knows​ that the American interrogation of the crisis of man was programmed to receive ‘a single inductive or ...”

“... success Wright had done much to promote, wasn’t the only protégé to turn against him. In 1963 Ralph Ellison wrote that, in Bigger Thomas, Wright had created not a black character other black people would recognise, but ‘a near subhuman indictment of white oppression’ crudely ‘designed to shock whites out of their apathy’. ...”

“... I write ‘about’: but also for everyone else whom I can reach. I am of the same opinion as Ralph Ellison, who says that he finds something precious in being black in America: but that he is also reaching for more than that. ‘I was taken very early,’ he writes, ‘with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all ...”

“... than read Coates’s blog and nod. ‘Need my skin blind me to all other values?’ an exasperated Ralph Ellison wrote in 1963. It’s a question Coates and many others wouldn’t think to ask today. The crisis of the black intellectual now, if there is one, isn’t that he lacks the means or the platform to represent his people but that it is too easy to ...”

“... not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text. Imagine recording the ...”

“... Jerry remarks to his sceptical black girlfriend, before making an uncomfortable allusion to Ralph Ellison: ‘I enjoyed being an alien. Fuck them. The invisible man. Fine.’ Perhaps more damagingly, Kelman’s satire on the US security industry is curiously tame. Not only has DeLillo done this kind of thing with greater gusto and vision, but ...”

“... a cautionary roster of the silent that included Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison. Heller’s history reflected theirs – the dreams of youth and years of literary apprenticeship, a period of obsessed scribbling, enthusiasm from a publisher, a ripple of applause from the fraternity of reviewers, followed by the ever ...”

“... he is probably best regarded as the intellectual child of the great 19th-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his admirer the poet Walt Whitman. Bloom inherited rhetorical tics from Emerson, in particular a penchant for the resounding statement that hypes its own grandeur to the skies. He also took from him intellectual priorities: a cultural ...”

“... and his real-life followers who provoked James Baldwin in ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’ and Ralph Ellison in ‘The World and the Jug’ to fight hard against Native Son as a model for black writers. These essays are pertinent to the sort of reading Martha Nussbaum wants to perform. They are a warning against it. Nussbaum comes close to saying that ...”

“... Henry Roth’s silence was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with ...”

“... unfolded by reading about them in the Herald Tribune. Richard Wright remained in Paris. Neither Ralph Ellison nor Langston Hughes took part in the Civil Rights Movement (and Ellison took a dim view of Baldwin’s involvement), just as writers like Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney avoided active involvement in the public ...”

“... it for his own darkly funny and deadly serious purposes. The narrator has parallels with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy (both inheritors of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man). The accident on the set of the war movie alludes to Invisible Man, and the arrogant, racist Auteur takes the place of the white man who ...”