Book contents
- Ralph Ellison in Context
- Ralph Ellison in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Geographical, Institutional, and Interpersonal Contexts
- Part II Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts
- Part III Literary and Critical Contexts
- Chapter 20 The Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 21 Ellison’s Early Writings
- Chapter 22 The Wright School
- Chapter 23 Literary Modernism
- Chapter 24 Beyond Raglan’s Hero: Ellison’s Ritualist Influences
- Chapter 25 Sociology
- Chapter 26 The Soapbox Speech in Ellison’s Fiction
- Chapter 27 Postwar Literary Aesthetics
- Chapter 28 Ellison as Correspondent
- Part IV Reception and Reputation
- Index
Chapter 28 - Ellison as Correspondent
from Part III - Literary and Critical Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2022
- Ralph Ellison in Context
- Ralph Ellison in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Geographical, Institutional, and Interpersonal Contexts
- Part II Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts
- Part III Literary and Critical Contexts
- Chapter 20 The Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 21 Ellison’s Early Writings
- Chapter 22 The Wright School
- Chapter 23 Literary Modernism
- Chapter 24 Beyond Raglan’s Hero: Ellison’s Ritualist Influences
- Chapter 25 Sociology
- Chapter 26 The Soapbox Speech in Ellison’s Fiction
- Chapter 27 Postwar Literary Aesthetics
- Chapter 28 Ellison as Correspondent
- Part IV Reception and Reputation
- Index
Summary
Ralph Ellison may well have been the last of the great letter-writers. Beginning in the early 1930s, with his first hand-written letters to his mother while he was at Tuskegee Institute, all the way until a few months before his death in 1994, Ellison maintained a voluminous correspondence with many of the most notable writers and intellectuals of the 20th century. Often his letters become small essays, where he works out some of his most subtle and far-reaching ideas about literature, politics, history, race, and his most cherished theme, the great promise and painful betrayals of America. In letters to Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren, Albert Murray, Stanley Hyman, Kenneth Burke, and Richard Wright, Ellison maps the terrain that he would explore in his luminous chapters, in Invisible Man, and especially in his unfinished epic of America, Three Days Before the Shooting . . .
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- Information
- Ralph Ellison in Context , pp. 300 - 310Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021