This chapter examines the two major biographies published on Ralph Ellison since his death in 1994. Lawrence Jackson’s Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002) and Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison (2007) present vastly different portraits of Ellison’s achievement. Where Jackson’s presentation of Ellison’s life and achievement is largely triumphant, Rampersad sees Ellison’s life as a disappointment. At stake is not simply differing interpretations regarding the life of a major novelist or the merit of his work, but the need to grapple with the still contested meaning of Ellison’s life as a representative black intellectual in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.

This chapter focuses on biographies that illuminate the personal stories of African descendants born in the United States and are currently in print. Green provides a sample of biographies of Black leaders and cultural icons, from Charles Chesnutt’s study of the life of Frederick Douglass, published four years after Douglass’s death. She pinpoints major approaches to the study of African American life in the United States and identifies several subgenres of biography. Much of African American biography relies heavily on archival material — diaries and scrapbooks stored in Black homes, donations to libraries and civic centers, old letters saved by past lovers, interviews of friends and acquaintances, journals left behind by the dead — housed in various venues across the world. A major challenge of the biographer, then, is to write a story that interests and informs, and also shows the significance of the subject's life story; or in other words, to show a balance between the extraordinariness and the ordinariness of the life narrative subject. The chapter ends with suggestions of challenges for producing biographies in the future.