Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison's literary
executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic
includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews,
as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed
by Robert Penn Warren as "a body of cogent and subtle commentary
on the questions that focus on race," and Going to the
Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz
and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans
lead. "Ralph Ellison," wrote Stanley Crouch, "reached
across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans."
