SOURCE: A review of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XXVI, No. 5, February 4, 1996, p. 7.

In the following review, Nicholson examines The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison and two works by Albert Murray, providing a laudatory assessment of all three works and characterizing the two authors as "giants" in terms of their talent and achievements as writers.

The critic Stanley Crouch, himself no mean chronicler of the American scene, has dubbed Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison "the twin towers" of our national literature. The appellation is apt, invoking as it does both basketball (a game to which black athletes have brought both style and breath-taking improvisation all the more remarkable because performed with grace under pressure), and the black monoliths that dominate the skyline of lower Manhattan. The essays collected in these three volumes [The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach...