Booklist
Ralph Waldo Ellison was widely regarded during his lifetime as one of the deans of American letters. Although best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ellison was a prolific essayist and wrote numerous commentaries on race, culture, and other uniquely American complexities. Jazz was one of Ellison's obsessions--he was an aspiring trumpeter before he became a writer--and he wrote extensively on jazz, as a critic of the music and of jazz as a metaphor for American diversity, spontaneity, and complexity. Porter's analysis of Ellison's essays covers both of these themes, and he includes a discussion of the correspondence between Ellison and his close friends and collaborators, painter Romare Bearden and fellow critic Albert Murray. Essays on jazz influence in Invisible Man and Ellison's posthumous second novel, Juneteenth, are included, as well as commentary on Ellison's famous arguments with his critics, such as Amiri Baraka, Irving Howe, and Norman Mailer. Porter's commentary is enlightening but no substitute for the essays themselves. Ted Leventhal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Diane Middlebrook, author of Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton
... a view of the artist we have never before seen in such sharp focus.
