Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellisonwas an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act, a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory. For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 March 1914
CityOklahoma City, OK
CountryUnited States of America
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
I am nobody but myself.
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
...and yet I am what they think I am.
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable.
Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.