The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature by Miller D. Quentin

Author:Miller, D. Quentin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Ellison: A Voice from Underground

Native Son was the first novel by an African American to be selected by the once influential Book of the Month Club. Twelve years after its publication, Ellison’s Invisible Man earned an even higher accolade when it won the National Book Award. In his acceptance speech (published as “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion”) Ellison does not name Wright’s novel, but comes close when he says that he was not content to use the form of the “‘hard-boiled’ novel, with its dedication to physical violence, social cynicism and understatement” (Shadow, 103). He was hoping for something much grander, and reaches back to the great (white) American novels of the nineteenth century,

imaginative projections of the conflicts within the human heart which arose when the sacred principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights clashed with the practical exigencies of human greed and fear, hate and love. Naturally I was attracted to these writers as a Negro. Whatever they thought of my people per se, in their imaginative economy the Negro symbolized both the man lowest down and the mysterious, underground aspect of human personality.

(104)

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