SOURCE: "The Drama of Ralph Ellison," in The New York Review of Books, May 15, 1997, pp. 52-9.

In the following essay, Pinckney surveys Ellison's life and career.

1.

Invisible Man holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing then the pressures to do another are intense. A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority Invisible Man gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

Ellison published essays, magisterial in tone, often on how a "specifically 'Negro' idiom" has influenced and been influenced...