Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) was published when the centrism of Cold War liberalism was supplanting the radical, multiethnic working-class collectivism characteristic of the liberal-left Popular Front and New Deal. In 1949, amid sharpening conflicts with the US’s recent ally the Soviet Union, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s spatial trope of the “vital center” redefined the US political landscape to situate, as constitutive of a new liberalism, the extremist affirmation of American national values and institutions against conflated radicalisms of right and left. While Invisible Man is often read as aligned with vital center liberalism – and as declaring African American commitment to its ethos – this chapter recovers the more idiosyncratic and radical theorization of power, institutions, and social change in the novel. Like Schlesinger, Ellison uses a spatial trope – the depths or underground – to anchor a political intervention. Motivated by the threat of nuclear apocalypse, Ellison uses that trope to critique sociopolitical institutions whose actions betray the underlying egalitarian and collective ideals they proclaim. Ellison applies this critique to Marxian and Black nationalist movements, as well as to mainstream American economic and political institutions, thus crafting a singular reformulation of political radicalism for the postwar era.

Moving from the more explicitly political fiction of the 1930s and 1940s to the critiques of neoliberalism that emerged at the end of the century, this chapter traces how American realist writers engaged with the political questions that challenged and transformed the United States in the twentieth century. Despite realism’s association with progressive politics during the first half of the century, this chapter explores how American writers did not present a unified political voice; the views expressed in realistic fiction were as wide-ranging as the writers who produced them. The central part of this chapter considers how midcentury writers – a group that includes Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Yates – embraced new forms of realism to engage with and critique the shifting political realities of American life. The chapter concludes by exploring how Chang-rae Lee and Jonathan Franzen employed realism as way of chronicling the questions and challenges that the nation faced at the end of the millennium.

Looking back from the beginning of the twentieth century, H. M. Hyndman remembered his old rival William Morris as a sort of “impossibilist”: “As to the impossibilists,” he wrote in 1903, “they are many of them at bottom anarchists, who honestly believe that all political action is harmful. They are justified in holding that opinion, if they so believe; but they are certainly out of place in a political Socialist policy.”1 In a lighter style, G. B. Shaw wrote in 1895 to his friend, Janet Achurch – then performing in New York – that her husband, Charles Charrington, “seemed in excellent spirits, the day being pleasant. He is going to lecture – bless his heart, as you would say – at the Hackney Radical Club and at the Hammersmith Socialist Society; and this I think a good thing on the whole, as he ought to make an above-the-average public speaker, although among the Fabians he will probably be an Impossibilist of the Impossibilists.”2 And, in a 1910 account of an election in Yorkshire, an American journalist reflected on the logistical pressure that “socialist impossibilism” – combined with “three cornered fights” between “Liberals, Labors, and Tories” – could put on the will of working people: “In a scrutiny of the vote, the only evidence of lack of co-operation was, on one side, 20 ballots marked ‘socialism,’ and thereby ‘spoiled,’ indicating socialist impossibilism, and a falling of the Labor candidate behind the Liberal by about 400 votes, indicating Liberal whiggism.”3 Impossibilism, in that case, not only named a critical attitude toward the very idea of elections but, in an unsettled period of tightening competition between Liberal and Labour candidates, could also emerge as a decisive factor within elections. Although the impossibilist was often imagined as impractical, utopian, or naïve, even a small handful of dreamy or distracted spoilers could make a large difference in a period of increasingly close and hard-fought elections.

In Chapter 5, I turn to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Long understood in opposition to Richard Wright’s naturalism, Ellison’s work nevertheless retains its sense of social determination. Equal parts bildungsroman and picaresque, Invisible Man seems to undo every stable category it creates. Dominated by an idea of surplus that is both aesthetic and economic, the hallucinatory logic of Invisible Man represents a book-length dissection of our culture’s naturalization of race. In doing so, it reveals itself to be profoundly ambivalent about the protagonist’s search for his true self, which becomes, in this reading, a mark of his subjection to America’s racial imaginary. Like Beckett, then, Ellison presents a world with little hope, but his protest against catastrophe contains the negative image of a freedom currently impossible to attain.

The category of Civil War literature is not bounded by historical designation or lived experience; instead, this genre encompasses a broad range of reflections and reconstructions concerning the legacy imparted by the war. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, contemporary evaluations of the civil rights movement mobilize competing logics of Civil War memory. These versions of Civil War memory take shape in both personal and political registers, the subjective nature of which simultaneously confounds and perpetually renews understandings of the past. Three developments occurred in the 1950s and 1960s that brought such contradictory remembrance to light: the desegregation of public schools via Brown v. Board of Education, the commemoration of the Civil War’s centennial anniversary, and the deaths of the last remaining Civil War veterans. This final event characterizes the relevant work produced in both the civil rights movement and our contemporary moment, as writers continuously work to preserve, alter, or resist their ancestors’ history in ways informed by the interests and conflicts of the present.

Without a Messiah expected, and if one’s current pain or trial is meaningless, why not commit suicide? In the Modernist canon, suicide is typically putting an end to one’s misery because there’s no reason not to do so, or because one is in any event a machine caused to do so by necessary causes and effects. Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus is an essay on how to live without hope or suicide; his novel The Plague starts with an averted suicide and ends with limited hope – or a hope for limits. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins and ends with the central duo’s wish, both times deferred, to hang themselves. Modernist responses to the question of meaning, and the attendant problem of suicide, include: persisting in hope or waiting despite the minimal probability of hope’s fulfillment (Franz Kafka, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Beckett); the epiphanies of the everyday, getting what it seemed you hoped for even without exactly having hoped for it (Virginia Woolf); affirmation of the repetitions, recurrences, and accidents of natural and human life, overcoming their sameness through an act of will (Camus).

This chapter considers Ellison’s contradictory relationship to the black writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. While Ellison met and conversed with Alain Locke about black writing as an undergraduate at Tuskegee, and benefitted directly from mentoring by African American creative forebears like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright after his move to New York in the late 1930s, he also expressly distanced himself from these figures later. In chapters like 1963-64’s canonical “The World and the Jug,” for example, Ellison emphasizes the influence of various white modernists like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and André Malraux as he downplays his debt to Hughes and Wright, both of whom bookended the politicized aesthetic of the Renaissance. As a counterpoint, I consider Ellison stylistic points of resemblance with these earlier black modernists to suggest a more substantial genealogical connection than Ellison himself admitted at times in his own rhetorical self-fashioning.

Although Ralph Ellison’s work endeavors to recover a sense of agency for black men, critics have paid relatively little attention to gender per se in the work, focusing instead on the more prominent issues associated with race, such as self-definition and literary paternity, as though these categories exist independent of the discursive formations of gender that subtend them. Ellison's essays as well as his fiction provide illuminating glimpses into the role that masculinity plays in his conception of racialized agency. As in Invisible Man itself, this conception turns on symbolizing homosexuals and women as the abjected other of a properly gendered, properly agentive masculine black subject.

This chapter examines the oratorical tradition of the soapbox speech in Ellison's fiction and describes the similarities between prominent New York orators of the early twentieth century and aspects of the protagonist of Invisible Man.

To date there has not been much digital humanities work on Ralph Ellison, simply because the field tends not to produce single-author studies. Yet Ellison's work is well-suited to digital methods. In this chapter I examine the DH affordances of Ellison’s work, surveying potential projects before turning to a case study, in which I use existing digital methods to examine the influences on Ellison's style from writers like Eliot, Wright, Hemingway, and others. His deployment of those styles will serve as the basis for a broader discussion of what DH practices might apply to—or learn from—Ellison studies.

This chapter explores Ellison’s critical engagement with the black cultural radicalisms of the Black Power era (c. 1965-75). The chapter’s main focus is Ellison’s response to the writer-activist Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). For Ellison, the work of 1960s black radicals was an unwarranted, even unprincipled refusal of the promise of American cultural pluralism, a promise that blacks themselves had long struggled mightily to fulfill. But Baraka’s generation had reckoned seriously with pluralism; it was not simply Black Power’s other. Indeed, a number of Baraka’s contemporaries embraced Ellison’s pluralist interventions as a usable black past.

Ellison served as a cook and baker in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, visited Wales and France, and was a member of the National Maritime Union. This marks a critical turning point in his life and career. This paper considers those experiences as an important context for his life and work. All of his subsequent fiction and some significant nonfiction was informed by and reflects this experience to some extent.

Ellison came to New York City with a musical education from Tuskegee and an interest in pursuing sculpture. But owing to his new friendships with young writers, including Richard Wright, and his job working for the Federal Writer’s Project collecting “Negro Lore,” his focus soon shifted to writing. This chapter explores the influence that Ellison’s early New York encounters had on inspiring his first attempts at writing fiction and in shaping the thematic and aesthetic concerns that would endure throughout his life’s work.

Ellison spent more time in New York City than in any other place. The half-century Ellison lived in post-World War II New York coincided not only with the city’s ascendance to the global center of arts, letters, and finance, but also with the transformation of the U.S. into a global hegemon. By the 1970s Ellison had become an important figure in several of the city’s institutions. As one of the nation’s foremost writers, and a resident of Harlem, Ellison’s life in New York highlights the artistic center and the cultural margins of the city.

Ellison’s perspective on fascism might seem underdeveloped for a writer who rose to prominence during the postwar moment Eric Sundquist describes in Strangers in the Land, when many African American writers felt, with American Jews, a shared anti-fascist struggle. Ellison politics are more often framed by his views of the left, which shifted from his early Marxist publications to his critical depictions of the Brotherhood in Invisible Man. Ellison’s manuscripts, and some early writings however, reveal a complex reckoning with fascism, as does his portrait of Ras in Invisible Man.

Shortly after the publication of Native Son, literary critics began to assume that Richard Wright was the head of a group of authors who emulated his literary style. Critics of the 1940s and 1950s included in this group, which they dubbed “The Blues School” or “The Wright School of Postwar Negro Fiction,” authors like Chester Himes, Ann Petry, and, prior to the publication of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. This chapter will throw a new perspective on the relationship between Ellison and Wright, by investigating how Ellison positioned himself vis-à-vis the critical claim that he was a member of “The Wright School.”

The political significance of Invisible Man’s literary aesthetics has long been contested. In the dominant narrative, Ellison is a model minority endorsing ‘vital center’ liberalism and anticommunism; revisionary scholarship has insisted on a muted but nonetheless influential relationship to the Left. Regardless, debates have consistently reproduced readings that submit to Cold War ideological imperatives. By tracking this critical genealogy and its limitations from the 1950s to the present, and incorporating recent theorizations of ‘black interiority,’ this chapter recasts the political significance of Ellisonian aesthetics—a project dedicated not to confirming, but rather dissenting from the Cold War’s hegemonic political binary.

Fanny McConnell Ellison’s influence threads throughout key literary and political milieus of twentieth century America. Educated at Fisk University and the University of Iowa, she was a columnist and writer for The Chicago Defender, founder of The Negro People’s Theater in Chicago, and political and Civil Rights activist before meeting Ralph Ellison, whom she later married, in 1946. Her income materially supported the couple while Ralph wrote Invisible Man, which Fanny (among others) helped edit. Her editorial advice on Ralph’s manuscripts as well as her care for his papers after his death substantially influenced his literary legacy.

In his essay “The Golden Age: Time Past,” Ralph Ellison does not disguise his distaste either for bebop music or for “the sharp, ugly…rebellion” bop’s pioneers were waging against the formal conventions of folk jazz and the Blues. Rather than conclude, as Robert O’Meally does, that Ellison was “deaf to virtually all jazz beyond Basie and Ellington,” this chapter re-contextualizes Ellison’s criticism of bebop an extension of his philosophy of temporality. Ellison believed that one’s experience of time determined one’s understanding of history, and bebop, which formalizes a discontinuous sense of time, clashed with his durational view of the past and its bearing on the present.

This chapter will survey the critical reception of Ellison’s second novel from the time its first excerpt was published as a short story in 1960. It will explore critical responses to the excerpts Ellison published (1960-78), to Juneteenth (1999), and to Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010), taking note of dissenting and celebratory approaches in literary media, while taking stock of scholarly trends and important scholarly articles. This chapter will approach Ellison’s post-Invisible Man fiction—an archive unto itself—in terms germane to understanding Ellison’s cultural vision and humanistic project, delineating lines of thought that recognize its puzzle-like qualities as well as its mediation on American racial history.