Bücher von Ralph Ellison

'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves'Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans.This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation.With an Introduction by John F. Callahan'Brilliant' Saul Bellow

Ralph Ellison (1913-94) is a foremost figure in American literature, hailed for his seminal novel Invisible Man (1952), a breakthrough representation of the American experience and Black everyday life. Lesser known, however, is his lifelong engagement with photography. Photographer is the first book dedicated to Ellison's extensive work in the medium, which spans from the 1930s to the '90s.Throughout his life, photography played multiple roles for Ellison: a hobby, a source of income, a note-taking tool and an artistic outlet. During his formative years in New York City in the 1940s, he keenly photographed his surroundings, with many images serving as field notes for his writing. In the last decades of his life, as he grappled with his much-anticipated second novel, Ellison turned inward, and he studied his private universe at home with a Polaroid camera. At all times his photography reveals an artist steeped in modernist thinking who embraced experimentation to interpret the world around him, particularly Black life in America. In a 1956 letter to fellow writer Albert Murray, Ellison underscored photography's importance to his creative process: "You know me, I have to have something between me and reality when I'm dealing with it most intensely." Accompanying the photographs in this book are several essays situating Ellison's work within his broader career as a writer, as well an excerpt from his 1977 essay "The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience."Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation and the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust

Offering students and scholars a variety of interpretations from which to fashion their own views of the novel and the man who created it, this text takes the position that there can be no last word on "Invisible Man". The essays share a respect for the novel's fluidity and for every reader's encounter with its narrator, story, and meanings.