Ralph Ellison
Story Stream
Ralph Ellison’s Alchemical Camera October 21, 2024
Ralph Ellison’s papers in the Library of Congress include hundreds of photographs that the novelist took over many years, mostly as a serious amateur and also, for a brief period in the late 1940s, as an aspiring professional. They range from the str...
Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Cover of His New Memoir April 06, 2023
The book is finished, in one sense, and not finished in another sense. Story and words are there, copy editing is done, pages laid out, an ISBN number assigned. What remains is the cover, something over which the author has little control, and yet wh...
American Paradoxes January 17, 2023
A historical tension lies at the center of the American nation. On the one hand, the nation’s founding documents express the universalist humanist principles of liberty and equality. On the other, those documents govern a country settled by a specifi...
How Ellison Got 'Invisible Man' Into the Canon July 04, 2022
The “author myth” surrounding Ralph Ellison usually centers on the follow-up novel to Invisible Man that never happened, the many years of promises unfulfilled. But if writing novel #2 was so difficult for Ellison, how did novel #1 happen?If you want...
