Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad
When I was an indecisive undergraduate student, I came across the name of an influential scholar (as he was described then by the professor whose course I was taking). The scholar's name was Arnold Rampersad. I remember being startled by the name. Rampersad, I felt, had to be West Indian. He is. At a time when I was unsure about where to focus my studies, and unsure about my ability (as a "green" West Indian) to ever write credibly on African-American literature, heck any literature--there was so much I didn't know--it was encouraging to see that a West Indian was so influential in the field of American Literature.
No, I didn't decide that day, or even that semester to study literature, but I did hold my head a little higher in my classes after that. I owe Arnold Rampersad a great big thank-you for making this West Indian woman feel a lot more comfortable about studying Literature in huge American undergraduate classrooms, and in smaller, intimate graduate seminars.
The book (imaged above) is Rampersad's latest (published in April 2007, and reprinted in January 2008) work. It is a biography of Black-American writer Ralph Ellison whose Invisible Man is described by Rampersad as follows:
Young writers today, black as well as white, have many sources to draw on and many beacons of inspiration to guide them. And yet Invisible Man is in many ways as admirable, fascinating, and complex today as when it was first published. Among novels by black Americans, its only true rival in terms of quality of craft might be Morrison's Beloved, and the wide range of effects in Ellison's novel is probably unmatched by any other black novelist. Ellison, we should remember, set out consciously to write a novel that was simultaneously about a black man and about an Everyman who transcended race, and to a surprising extent he succeeded in doing so. His novel continues to appeal to blacks and whites alike, and especially to men. Moreover, in writing so brilliantly about race, which remains and probably will remain the most challenging topic in American culture, he practically guaranteed the continuing resonance of Invisible Man.
The book was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. Read more here at Amazon[dot]com.
