Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison

Book excerpt: One of the most important American authors and public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Ralph Ellison had a keen and unsentimental understanding of the relationship between race, art, and activism in American life. He contended with other writers of his day in his examination of the entrenched racism in society, and his writing continues to inform national conversations in letters and culture. The essays in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison will help instructors in colleges, high schools, and prisons teach not only the indispensable Invisible Man but also Ellison's short stories, his essays, and the two editions of his second, unfinished novel, Juneteenth and Three Days before the Shooting . . . . In considering Ellison's works in relation to jazz, technology, humor, politics, queerness, and disability, this volume mirrors the breadth of Ellison's own life, which extended from the Jim Crow era through the Black Power movement.