| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ralph Ellison: A Biography. By Arnold Rampersad. (New York: Knopf, 2007. 657 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-375-40827-4.)

All biographies of famous people promise an "aha" moment: When the brush stroke, chord progression, or topic sentence takes on its magisterial hue. This creates the necessary suspense otherwise absent in much biography. Alternatively, the genre can be inherently dull if too great an effort is made to avoid such moments of revelation. Arnold Rampersad's ability to avoid this quandary distinguishes his biography of Ralph Ellison. Rampersad approaches his subject without starry-eyed reverence or removed skepticism. This is an engaged portrait of one of the most elusive U.S. literary figures of the twentieth century. Rampersad does not simply paint a picture of Ellison's meandering rise to fame, he analyzes it through a lens that lets the reader make up her or his mind about the subject.

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