The New York Review of Books

Invisible Man has never been out of print. Acclaimed when it appeared in 1952, the novel’s reputation has only risen since. For a long time black audiences could admire this indisputably great work, but were unable to embrace Ralph Ellison, because he seemed so determined to be unavailable to them. In 1953, Ellison received the National Book Award, which gave him one of the worst cases of Negro Firsterism in postwar US history. His time coincided with that of fellow stars of integration, Jackie Robinson and Ralph Bunche and Thurgood Marshall and the astonishing Leontyne Price. Yet Ellison was splendid as a brilliant, boldly pro-American Negro writer who declined to believe that another black person could write or had written a novel as deserving as his of a place in the front rank of modern American literature. He became something of a grand old man early on, while still in his fifties, so hoisted up was he by his literary achievement. He was beautifully dressed, elegant in manner, but a man’s man; someone welcomed in the highest academic circles and sought out by presidents. However, his desire to stand apart from, if not above, other black writers meant that he had to pretend he wasn’t worried some African-American was going to come along and top his performance before he had had the chance to outdo himself.

In Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Arnold Rampersad refers to an article published in Ellison’s lifetime in which he is grouped with Henry Roth and Harper Lee as writers who did not publish a second novel after the tremendous success of their first. But Ellison didn’t decide to give up fiction; his eventual problem was that he couldn’t stop working on his second novel: he kept adding and adding and not letting go. Juneteenth, published posthumously in 1999—Ellison died in 1994—and edited by his able literary executor, John Callahan, is only a portion of the manuscript he left behind. For decades, his second novel was known only through the few chapters that appeared in anthologies or small literary quarterlies. In the interviews that he gave, Ellison himself raised expectations, making his unfinished novel something of a topic, a scandal, on the order of Harold Brodkey’s A Party of Animals. Though his mask was generally flawless, Ellison could be defensive about the work as the years went by, Rampersad reports, and his friends learned not to ask. A certain defensiveness on his behalf seeps into Rampersad’s tone as well after a while, though the aim of his biography is to reconcile Ellison, the cultural conservative, with the black America that came of age in the Sixties, the period he was so out of touch with.

Zora Neale Hurston would have adored knowing his white folks. Rampersad makes it clear that Ellison was very much in step with the white America of the 1960s that asked him to sit on the boards of the Ford Foundation and …