An Interview with Ralph Ellison

RK: What follows is an interview that I did with Ralph Ellison for the BBC in the fall of 1965. Keep that date in mind when you hear some of these replies. His reputation as one of America's best writers is based on only one novel, which was published in 1952. Invisible Man received the National Book Award the following year and in 1965 a large poll of American critics and writers judged Invisible Man to be the best single novel of the post-war period. Ellison, born in Oklahoma City, in 1914, once wrote that from his youth he has been haunted by the ideal of a renaissance man. He first studied music at Tuskegee University in Alabama, then sculpture in New York, before writing became his dominant interest. He has also worked in audio-electronics and as a professional photographer. In addition to fiction he has written criticism of jazz, literature, and culture. He has lectured at many American universities, and from 1970-79 was the Albert Schweitzer Professor at New York University. What is particularly impressive, if not awesome about Ellison, is not only the diversity of his cultural interests but the high excellence he achieves in those he chooses to favor. RK: Your collection of essays Shadow and Act is dedicated to Morteza Sprague; and like others, I have wondered who is Morteza Sprague? Do you look at him as a hero or as a friend? RE: Morteza Sprague, a graduate of Hamilton College, was a professor of English, and hardly older than several of his students. As a Tuskegee fresh man I took his senior course in the nineteenth Century English novel. He was an honest teacher, for when I went to him about Eliot and such people, he told me he hadn't given much attention to them and that they weren't taught at Tuskegee. But he told me what to do about it: the places to find discussions and criticism.