An essential new book, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, presents this writer in all his candor, seriousness, outrage and wit. Nearly all of these letters are previously unpublished. What brings them alive is that while they brood on the largest of issues — identity, alienation, the political responsibilities of the artist — they’re earthy and squirming with all the vital things of everyday experience ... You move from the cascade of Ellison’s thinking about art and ideas, for example, to one of the funniest and warmest letters I’ve ever read ... This collection has so many incidental pleasures that I nearly always felt lucky to be reading it while the rest of the world had to make do with Twitter ... His writing about music is nearly always sublime ... There’s too much of John F. Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor and co-editor of these letters, in this collection. His introductions to each decade of letters are overly long, not especially perceptive and spill too many details ... Collections of letters, like biographies, build narrative momentum — how will Ellison get out of this jam? — momentum that Callahan dashes by too often emerging in the narrative to tell you what is going to happen and to pre-empt the best lines ... contains so much fine human stuff, however, that the indelible line from Invisible Man reverberates over it: 'Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?'

This book is a treasure. It serves in part as an alternative to the view of Ellison provided by Arnold Rampersad’s 2007 biography, a highly informative, eminently readable work that nonetheless portrayed its subject as something of a cold fish. The man who emerges from Selected Letters is complex and has his prickly moments but comes across, in the main, as a warm human being who valued artistic achievement, meaningful intellectual exchanges, good music, Southern cooking, a sip of whiskey and good times with old friends. And in an age when people text because they can’t be bothered with email, it is a pleasure to read the letters of one who wrote at length, thoughtfully, and with wonderful humor about everything from family stories to literature to the state of his nation to—inevitably—race ... Mr. Callahan provides a general introduction to the book as well as a warm, perceptive introduction to each decade of letters.

In heft and breadth, the missives here make up the Big Book of Life that Invisible Man’s triumph augured, and that we’ve been awaiting (not always patiently) for all these years ... Ellison’s letters vibrate with striking imagery, flinty repartee, shrewd literary insight, and bountiful reverie. One can’t help thinking while wandering through this capacious volume that if only this mercurial and meticulous man could have somehow sustained the high-spirited, polychromatic flow of his correspondence and carried it into his regular routine, there could have been two, three, even four more novels bearing his name ... in the end, Ralph Ellison, as so many writers before and since, turned out to be an even deeper and more fascinating creation than the nameless hero of his great novel.

Admittedly, the size of the book is a bit daunting. Fear not. It is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike ... These framing essays are critical for navigating this massive volume, as are the annotations accompanying the individual letters. The collection offers an intimate portrait of the writer and intellectual ... The thinker and writer who emerges in these pages is a complicated, funny, intense, fiercely intelligent, ambitious, irreverent and disturbing figure.

Bearing in mind the epistolary origins of the novel as a literary invention, one can regard the results—sixty years of correspondence progressing to a narrative—as another Ellisonian magnum opus, one necessarily unfinished ... is wisely divided by decade, starting with the nineteen-thirties, and Ellison’s voice is urgent from the start ... The far more intimate letters to Murray cease in the sixties, presumably because they were now Harlem neighbors. Yet it can start to feel that such intimacy has become more elusive for Ellison, who has become less the Great Black Hope than the Great Explainer. And explanations, interesting though they might be, do not a novel make ... The later letters portray a novelist busily not finishing his novel, despite working on it; along with his essays, gathered in two collections while he was alive, these letters contain his most extended, indispensable riffs. Earlier letters reacting to the Brown v. Board decision are remarkable, tying the hopes for his new novel with the hopes of a nation. But these later letters find a mind who could no longer attach his personal ambitions to the larger struggles of his day ... Where the letters from the nineteen-forties are preparations for a strike and those from the fifties reverberate with his novelistic achievement, the later letters can start to feel like a way of avoiding the wider world, a world that this writer required in order to create. One feels, in these letters, an art that circles loss.

... startling, and so vivid, muscular, frank, lengthy, and involving are [Ellison's] missives, it’s clear that writing was his sustenance ... Ellison’s letters to family, friends (especially Albert Murray and Saul Bellow), colleagues, agents, editors, and fans have the agility, wit, and spectrum of the moods, tones, and pace found in jazz, which he loved. Editor John F. Callahan provides a chronology, a richly dimensional general introduction, and enlightening overviews of Ellison’s preoccupations, endeavors, and travels during each decade. Ellison’s supremely well-crafted, captivating, often caustic letters chronicle his personal life, experiences teaching and lecturing, replies to endless queries about his masterpiece, and research into his family history for his uncompleted novel. Ellison also delivers probing inquiries into the complexities of race, identity, Americanness, and creativity.

Whether writing to his peers such as Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Albert Murray, or Stanley Edgar Hyman, or addressing his mother; his wife, actress Rose Poindexter; or lifelong friends from Oklahoma City, Ellison never fails to be entertaining or illuminating ... An invaluable volume for Ellison scholars and recommended for all readers interested in American literature.

... generous ... Callahan provid[es] compact but informative introductions to each segment ... Ellison’s many letters to Richard Wright and Albert Murray are the most intimate, about matters personal, professional, and political. He candidly discusses with Wright, in August 1945, his break with the Communist Party, and in June 1951, updates Murray on the progress of Invisible Man ... A splendid, indeed exemplary, collection, this is a remarkable historic document crafted with great scholarly acumen.

A rich collection reveals a writer’s aspirations and frustrations ... a model of scholarship ... Organized by decade beginning in the 1930s, the letters are contextualized by a comprehensive general introduction, a focused introduction to each chapter, and informative footnotes where needed; a detailed chronology appends the volume ... An impressively edited volume commemorates a canonical literary figure.