Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man remains one of the most important novels of the 20th Century. But the story of Ellison is an odd one, and you make of it what you will. He never finished another novel in the forty or so years after that one, his first. Juneteenth would have been his second; he may just have been unable to pull it together. At one point he claimed that second book was lost in a fire. A version of it was published posthumously.

This interview, via BrainPickings, is apparently a rare one for Ellison, and you get the feeling while watching it that he doesn't like speaking as an author because of the expectations of "the author speaks." But that doesn't make him any less than interesting throughout. Invisible Man is an indispensable book of the American psyche; visiting its author is similarly indispensable.


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