It’s true that Ralph Ellison won the 4th annual National Book Award in 1953, however, one could argue that the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which had been in existence since 1918, was the more prestigious prize at the time, with a long history of having selected such classic American novels as The Grapes of Wrath, The Age of Innocence, et cetera.

I’ll question the sports analogy too. Ralph Ellison was born in 1913 and so he was about 40 when he won the National Book Award in 1953 and had attended college, served in WWII and been married twice. I think his “psychology” might be a tad different than that of the proverbial young athlete of the analogy.

I also don’t know if Ralph Ellison’s “intellectual achievement was unparalleled.” Gwendolyn Brooks had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1948 and she, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, et al had been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships. Richard Wright’s bestselling novel “Native Son” (1940) and autobiography “Black Boy” (1944) had both been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club which you might say was that era’s equivalent of Oprah’s Book Club. Compare recent National Book Award winners like “Ship Fever” by Angela Barrett and “The News From Paraguay” by Lily Tuck, both critical and artistic successes but almost unknown when compared to Oprah’s books like “A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry and “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides, both prize-winners in their own right which one might argue became more successful after being selected as book club choices.

I don’t know that I’d describe Ralph Ellison’s rise to literary stardom as “meteoric” either. Before he became the first black writer to win the National Book Award, he had been the first black writer to serve as a regular critic for the Communist party’s literary journal New Masses, from 1939 until 1942. He had been the first black writer to publish a piece of literary criticism in the Antioch Review; one of a handful, which would have included W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and J. Saunders Redding, to have written a review published by the NY Times; and a member of another handful that had been invited to the writers’ colony at Yaddo. He was probably the first black writer to have ever published in the British journal Horizon, and he had been the first black writer to publish fiction in Partisan Review. I believe an excerpt from the novel in progress had been published in Horizon a few years before the publication of “Invisible Man.” So his steps leading up to Invisible Man had taken more than 10 years and he was hardly an unknown on the literary scene.

In addition, for about 18 months in 1941 and 1942 he co-edited, with former political prisoner Angelo Herndon, a literary journal called The Negro Quarterly. Although its racial content was considered almost seditious in the context of WWII, it was not an exclusively black publication, in fact, Ellison solicited contributions from white literary critics like his friend Stanley Edgar Hyman, whose work he felt black writers could benefit from. It made him Ralph Ellison a player in an era when “little magazines” like Partisan and even academic literary journals like Antioch had an influence unlike anything today.

As to the type of biography it is, I think there are different styles. We learn that Ralph Ellison shared an office at Rutgers with Joseph Frank, who went on to write a five-volume, 2,520-page biography of Dostoevsky which incidentally is the subject of an essay in “Consider the Lobster” (2005) by David Foster Wallace, who considers it more a cultural-history than a literary biography like Ellman’s Joyce. Joseph Blotner’s massive two-volume compendium of information about nearly everything that William Faulkner ever said, did, and wrote is invaluable as a scholarly reference, while Stephen Oates’s biography of Faulkner is a ‘pure’ biography which uses a narrative form to tell the story of Faulkner’s life. (On a personal note, I chose the Oates biography over the Frederick Karl and Jay Parini biographies of Faulkner for a few reasons, one of which was that Ralph Ellison blurbed it and I knew his thoughts about Faulkner from reading “Trading Twelves” and “Shadow and Act.”) Then there’s the psychoanalytical style which I think is implied in the back cover copy reference to ‘Richard Ellman on James Joyce.’ A more recent example of a psychoanalytical style might be Jonathan Weiss’s biography of Irene Nemirovsky.

My point is that “Ralph Ellison: A Biography” belongs not to the all-inclusive, encyclopedic type but rather to the latter category, the psychoanalytical type. I’m the kind of person who’s disinclined to accept anything like a racial psychoanalysis of someone, especially when it’s an essentially negative one like I feel this one is.

Anyway, thanks for the forum.