American novelist, whose Invisible Man of 1952 is one of the essential American books of the century. His Paris is deliberately brief: he came in the summer of 1954 to travel and lecture, spent a few weeks among the American expatriates, and gave The Paris Review its Art of Fiction interview at the Café de la Mairie the day before he left. Unlike Richard Wright and James Baldwin, he would not stay.
Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913, trained as a musician at Tuskegee, and moved to New York in 1937, where Richard Wright encouraged him to write and gave him his first commission. Invisible Man appeared in 1952 and won the National Book Award; it is a novel of jazz structure, folklore and psychological interiority rather than the naturalistic protest writing Wright had made dominant, and the difference was understood by everyone involved as an argument.
In the summer of 1954 Ellison came to Europe to travel and lecture. The trip ended in Paris, where he spent a few weeks among the American expatriate writers. On the day before he left the city, he sat down with the staff of The Paris Review at the Café de la Mairie on the place Saint-Sulpice and talked about art and the novel. The result was The Art of Fiction No. 8, published in the spring of 1955, interviewed by Alfred Chester and Vilma Howard, and it remains one of the fullest statements he ever made about how he worked.
The choice of that café is a small piece of literary geography with an unusual density to it: the magazine's own introduction to the interview notes that Djuna Barnes had written Nightwood there. Two very different books, two decades apart, attached to the same handful of tables opposite the church.
What matters most about Ellison's Paris is that he left it. Wright had settled there permanently and become a celebrity; James Baldwin had arrived in 1948 with almost nothing and used the distance to see America more clearly. Ellison declined that route entirely, and in 1956 turned down an invitation to the Présence Africaine congress of Black writers in Paris. He believed his material — the language, the music, the folklore, the specific friction of American democracy — was inseparable from the country itself, and that European intellectual circles tended to read Black American writing narrowly, as protest, missing what he thought was the more interesting half.
He spent the rest of his life in New York, taught, wrote essays of great authority, and never finished the second novel. He died in 1994. A version assembled from the manuscripts was published as Juneteenth in 1999.
Born in Oklahoma City on 1 March.
Moves to New York; Richard Wright encourages him to write and gives him his first assignment.
Invisible Man is published; it wins the National Book Award the following year.
Travels and lectures in Europe; ends the trip in Paris among the American expatriates.
Gives The Paris Review its Art of Fiction interview at the Café de la Mairie, the day before leaving the city.
Declines the invitation to the Présence Africaine congress of Black writers in Paris.
Dies in New York on 16 April, the second novel unfinished.
No. He visited in the summer of 1954 for a few weeks at the end of a European lecture trip, and deliberately rejected the expatriate life that Richard Wright and James Baldwin chose.
At the Café de la Mairie on the place Saint-Sulpice, on the day before he left Paris in 1954. It was published as The Art of Fiction No. 8 in spring 1955.
He held that his raw material — American language, music, folklore and democratic friction — could not be worked at a distance, and that European readers tended to reduce Black American writing to protest.
Wright mentored him in New York in the late 1930s and gave him his first writing assignment. Invisible Man was later read, by both men, as a rejection of Wright's naturalistic protest mode, and the friendship cooled.
Frequented · 1954
On the day before he left Paris in the summer of 1954, Ellison talked to the staff of The Paris Review at the Cafe de la Mairie about art and the novel. The conversation was published as The Art of Fiction No. 8 in spring 1955.
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