I used to get this same sense of a distorted reality years ago when I’d come every once in a while on a shellshocked veteran of World War I. I’ll agree with that however, I didn’t select the surrealism, the distortion, the intensity as an experimental technique but because reality is surreal. Ellison continued: “Several reviews pointed out parts of the book they considered surrealistic. While thematically it was part of the book, it nevertheless would have required different treatment its reality wasn’t as intense, as surreal, as the reality of that novel.” “I could see,” he said, “it was not part of the novel because it had to do with a more mature character. How could he have been that clear? Why hadn’t he been just enough confused - as most of us would be - to try to assimilate the kindred theme into the big novel? Mr. Ellison couldn’t just slough off that one. Ellison replied, “just to get a kindred theme out of the way.” Ellison’s only novel? “I wrote a short novel in the process of writing this one,” Mr. “It is felt that there is something in the Negro experience that makes it not quite right for the novel. Later the Communists took credit for teaching him to write, but that’s a lot of stuff.” He was passionately interested in the problems of technique and craft and it was an education. Meeting Wright at that time, when he hadn’t yet begun to be famous, was most fortunate for me. I then started looking for Eliot’s kind of sensibility in Negro poetry and I didn’t find it until I ran into Richard Wright.”

“I tried to understand it better and that led me to reading criticism. “It got me interested in literature,” Mr. Eliot’s, of course - and that turned out to be the most influential book in his life. Just about that time, though, along came “The Waste Land” - T.S. That got him to New York, bent on exploring stone with a hammer and clay with a wire gimmick. It turned out that he was born in Oklahoma City in 1914 and spent three years at the Tuskegee Institute, where he studied music and composition. Before putting him on the record as a thinking, talking chap, it seemed a good idea to root around in his biography.

Ellison has been, it must be admitted, obscure. Though up until this relatively triumphant event Mr.

The name is Ralph Ellison, heard here and there and one hopes everywhere because of his first, distinguished novel, “Invisible Man.” And to be heard of in the future, if predictions are worth anything at all.

Ellison ralph invisible man