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  • The Buzzard and the Bow
  • Brennan Maier (bio)
Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Unlike his grandfather, Alfred Ellison, who had been born a slave, Ralph Ellison was born a joke.1 Or at the very least into one, and a very particular, Negro American joke at that. Born Ralph Waldo Ellison in a house owned by an African-American man named Jefferson Davis Randolph, whose own son was named Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the densely symbolic scene of Ellison’s birth reads like something straight out of Invisible Man.

Indeed, with such unlikely beginnings, where do you even begin? Perhaps by noting that if chaos seemed to lurk beneath the surface of even birth, that most prosaic of biographical details, it should come as no surprise that the examination of Ellison’s life would turn out to require as considerable an investment of critical energy as was needed for the explication of his famously difficult novel. Fortunately, Ellison has found in Arnold Rampersad his ideal biographer, one whose ability to fashion great recalcitrant mountains of fact into a compelling narrative makes him ideally suited for the business at hand.

Given the necessary, but unenviable, task of returning imperfect flesh to the dry bones of Ellison’s monumental reputation, Rampersad sets about his difficult work with carefully measured energy, accomplishing his ends with impressive, even masterful, economy. And since, in Ellison’s case, we knew neither his fall nor his wrastling, only the darting blue flame of his incomparable prose, the story Rampersad tells is almost of necessity a sad one. As scrupulous and gifted a biographer as is working today, Rampersad has written the story of Ralph Ellison’s struggle and his fall.

The full significance of Professor Rampersad’s achievement, however, only becomes apparent when viewed in context as part of a broader effort in African-American letters. The most obvious and immediate context in which to locate Rampersad’s biography is [End Page 922] among recent scholarship on Ralph Ellison himself. In this respect, Rampersad has had the mixed fortune to be writing during a period of renewed scholarly interest in Ellison following the novelist’s death in 1994. Indeed, the years since his passing have witnessed a renaissance in Ellison scholarship, with Ellison’s own posthumous publications forming its most significant aspect. 2 In addition to Ellison’s own books, the last few years have seen the publication of such first-rate critical work as Lawrence Jackson’s groundbreaking biography Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: Wiley, 2002), Barbara Foley’s ongoing study of Ellison and the Cold War, John S. Wright’s brilliant Shadowing Ralph Ellison (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2006), Kenneth Warren’s So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), and Horace Porter’s Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2001), as well as fine anthologies by Ross Posnock, Ronald Judy and Jonathan Arac, and Lucas Morel. Nor does this already formidable list include work by such promising young scholars as Adam Bradley and Richard Purcell.

If recent Ellison scholarship forms its most immediate context, Rampersad’s biography—indeed all of his biographies—should also be viewed in a wider context as part of an ongoing methodological discussion among scholars of African-American literature and culture. Here, Rampersad’s work exists in what Ellison himself called a state of “antagonistic cooperation” with other schools of thought, particularly those associated with scholars Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr. In order to explain just how Rampersad’s approach relates to this other tradition, it is necessary to offer a brief, and admittedly greatly simplified, summary of the work of Stepto, Gates, and Baker.

By working out a critical language for the explication of African-American literary texts, and by constructing a series of intertextual genealogies for African-American literature, scholars like Stepto, Gates, and Baker sought to institutionalize the study of African-American letters by establishing a tradition, and by implication a canon, of African-American writing in which membership was to be based less on an author’s phenotype, or...

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