Ralph Ellison, Race, and American Culture

Abstract In the standard views of American culture after the war, and especially of the 1950s, the arts and intellectual life turned deeply conservative, reflecting the imperatives of the cold war, the migration to the suburbs, the new domesticity, and the rise of McCarthyism. A small academic industry has sprung up, linking every cultural development of the postwar period to the clenched mind-set of the cold war. At the same time, it has been more and more evident that the facile contrast between the fifties and the sixties is based on a deep simplification. The fifties were a far more restless, dynamic, and contradictory period than we have generally allowed. It can be easily shown how the roots of the sixties lay in the new energies of the postwar years, when writers, along with jazz musicians, abstract painters, and maverick filmmakers, contributed to a creative ferment that matched the growth of the economy and the spread of American influence. Working just outside the mainstream, often seemingly apolitical, these writers and artists helped shape a counterculture focused on the youthful dropout, the rebel without a cause, the disgruntled outsider who embodied new cultural values: improvisation, spontaneity, an experimental attitude. This last phrase comes not from the Beats but, surprisingly, from Ralph Ellison describing his 1952 novel Invisible Man as he accepted the National Book Award. It may be hard to imagine Ellison, always so correct and elegant in his personal demeanor, as any kind of radical, or as a forerunner of the counterculture. Moreover, no black writer was more warmly welcomed by the literary establishment or more reviled by his young successors when the catchwords of black nationalism took hold in the 1960s and ‘70s. Even before then, left-wing critics like Irving Howe had indicted Ellison and James Baldwin for turning their backs on the militant traditions of black anger associated with their mentor, Richard Wright.