Ralph Ellison

Name: Ralph Ellison
Author: Arnold Rampersad
ISBN: 9780307267320

Arnold Rampersad

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Ralph Ellison

Arnold Rampersad

awards won

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#1069 of 3,809 books · #406 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2007) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (2007).

Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison's strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage. Starting with Ellison's hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma and his ordeal as a student in Alabama, Rampersad documents his improbable, painstaking rise in New York to a commanding place on the literary scene. With scorching honesty but also fair and compassionate, Rampersad lays bare his subject's troubled psychology and its impact on his art and on the people about him.

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