"When American life is most American, it is apt to be most theatrical." - from "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" " have the obligation of freeing themselves-whoever their allies might be-by depending upon the validity of their own experience for an accurate picture of the reality which they would seek to change, and for a gauge of the values they would see made manifest." - from "The World and the Jug"" ![]() So many wonderful insights about democracy in the US and African American experience and art. I highly encourage you to read it just for the essays in Part I, though. Thus, if I average all of those together, I arrive at the final rating of 4 stars for the collection as a whole. This last section was in the middle for me, so around 4 stars. The third section of the volume has some miscellaneous pieces, including two unpublished essays. It was fine, but I didn't get nearly as much out of it as the essays in Part I, so it was more like a 3-star read. The second part is focused on music and musicians. ![]() Just pearls of wisdom in every essay, really. The first part was 100% a 5-star read for me. This classic essay collection by Ralph Ellison is divided into three parts. Along the way are Ralph's meditations on jazz, "the only musical art form native to America and invented by the Negroes", along with not-so-nice swipes at more radical Black writers such as Leroi Jones: "BLUES PEOPLE might work if Jones knew how to impose some sort of structure on his essays in music." More jarring is his support for President Lyndon Johnson during the early days of the Viet Nam War, "out of gratitude for his civil rights legislation." A terrific way to spend an evening or two communicating with a great mind. ![]() I wrote that chapter after my wife and I were addressed in a most condescending manner by a white couple at a hotel we were staying at." Ellison also conjures up the ghost of the man who taught him the most about writing, Richard Wright: "You must sketch your characters as Dostoevsky did, Wright would tell me". (Ellison's own modest judgment: "I doubt that it will last.) We gain some insights into the composition of that masterpiece that are startling: "The character of Ras is not based on Marcus Garvey. This sterling collection of essays and interviews reveal the man behind INVISIBLE MAN the novel critic Alfred Kazin called "the greatest literary voyage through an existential wilderness" produced after World War II.
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