PositiveThe NationThe Strange Career of William Ellis is a work of admirable sleuthing in which Jacoby has assembled a portrait of a man who deliberately sought to cover his own tracks ... One of the most tantalizing threads in Jacoby’s biography is the evidence that the African-American intelligentsia—or at least many members of it—recognized Ellis’s racial charade for what it was ... Jacoby urges us to see Ellis as a trickster who trangressed the boundaries of nation and race, turning obstacles into opportunities. It’s a weak interpretation of such a complicated, even bewildering, biographical subject, but it’s certainly more appealing than treating him as a tragic figure.
