Why read The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison?

Book cover of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

David Nicholson

Author

Though I never met him, Ralph Ellison has been my guide and literary mentor since I first read Shadow and Act, his first collection of essays. (It’s included here.) Countless times, I’ve written a sentence or come up with an idea I thought was original. And countless times, I've discovered Ellison got there first, years and years before.

The thread connecting this potpourri of reviews, criticism, meditative essays, and interviews is Ellison’s insistence on the centrality of the African-American experience to the American experience and his refusal to countenance the idea of black victimhood. “I recognize no American culture…

From David's list on race in America.