The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library Classics)

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. “Ralph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

Ellison was a believer in the hybrid nature of American culture, a position clearly articulated in the essay "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks." Elsewhere, he writes about the music of jazzmen Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian, the fiction of Richard Wright and Stephen Crane, and about the creation of his novel, Invisible Man that rocketed him to fame. This book brings together the contents of Ellison's Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, as well as a dozen or so other essays and talks previously uncollected.