Being Ralph Ellison: Remaking the Black Public Intellectual in the Age of Civil Rights

Most of the social realists of the period were concerned less with tragedy than with injustice. I wasn’t, and am not, primarily concerned with injustice, but with art.

—Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview”

Interviewer:

How do you feel about the criticism you sometimes get from black students who feel you haven’t been militant enough?

Ellison:

I say, “You’d be your kind of militant and I’ll be my kind of militant.”

—Interview with Ralph Ellison, Washington Post, August 1973

Soon after he published Invisible Man in April 1952, Ralph Ellison was quickly recognized as being the most prominent African American writer of his generation. Or, as Lawrence Jackson pointedly notes, “Ellison had moved from being an embattled social critic, a position he had occupied during most of the years he wrote Invisible Man, to being a symbol of America’s willingness to accept talented blacks.”¹ The publication of Invisible Man, coupled with the National Book Award he received a year after its publication, heralded the arrival of a new, formidable African American voice on the mainstream literary stage. Ellison also became widely recognized as a public intellectual who came to represent, to many, a writer whose ideas affirmed the possibilities of black American intellectualism. Ellison himself seemed to feel the same sense of possibility. The acceptance speech he gave after receiving the National Book Award spoke as directly to his elevated position as a novelist as it did to his desire to define and occupy his newly acquired public role and to shape his audience’s thoughts about the ways he believed his work should be understood. Although Richard Wright was an early mentor of Ellison and supporter of the work he encouraged Ellison to do, Ellison quickly defined for himself a body of ideas and a foundation of American philosophical and political thought on which his literary and intellectual aspirations were self-consciously built. His political foundation was embodied by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. His thoughts about literature were based in the literary production characterized by the writing of Mark Twain, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. It is worth emphasizing that Ellison’s literary apprenticeship was shaped by his association with a group of literary, intellectual, and political radicals who dismissed many of the New Negro movement’s Africanist identifications in favor of Marxist readings of black proletarian experience in America that firmly radicalized the political solution to the “race problem.”

My interest in this article is the period between the publication of Invisible Man and the early 1970s (roughly the period defined by the civil rights movement), when Ellison crafted his strategy for how he would define and occupy the public role in which he found himself and his work suddenly placed. As a public figure, Ellison engaged in a variety of broad cultural debates and conversations. While those ideas circulated in ways that Ellison certainly could not have controlled, my point here is that this was also the period when Ellison began a consciously revisionist process that deflected attention to his work away from its leftist origins and toward something that was decidedly more rooted in a language of aesthetics, of modernist impulse, and, most universally, of what he referred to in various ways as democratic possibility. When Ellison first began to control the narrative surrounding the reception of his work, the left was under attack in ways of which Ellison was certainly keenly aware. But Ellison was also keenly aware of his audience and keenly aware of the representative stature that he and his work occupied during that period.

Invisible Man was a breakthrough novel that synthesized mid-twentieth-century African American racial consciousness with America’s broader cultural aspirations and accomplishments. It also became a place around which Ellison could subsequently orient his ideas about the obligations of the American writer: “The writer, any American writer, becomes basically responsible for the health of American literature the moment he starts writing seriously...