Ralph Ellison, Partisan Review, and the Politics of the Page

This article positions Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man: Prologue to a Novel" as a response to Partisan Review's editorial apparatus. Ellison engages with articles published by James Baldwin, Anatole Broyard, Leslie Fiedler, and others to challenge the magazine's attitudes towards Black writers and African American culture as Ellison also uses the magazine as a platform to expand his readership and elevate his critical reception. Archival research from Ellison and Stanley Edgar Hyman contextualizes the "Prologue" as a direct response to Partisan Review, and secondary research is utilized to clarify Ellison's achievements with his work. The "Prologue" operates among multiple frequencies to allow Ellison to implicitly and explicitly confront a marginalizing literary discourse that Ellison finds inadequate and dismissive by successfully challenging conceptions of African American history, literature, and culture held by the magazine's readers and editors.