Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404170076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Ellison, who had been polishing the manuscript of his second novel, died at his Manhattan apartment, said his editor, Joe Fox of Random House. He had pancreatic cancer.
With "Invisible Man," Ellison sought to write a great American novel, not just a great black American novel. The rite of passage story won the 1952 National Book Award. More than 1 million copies have been sold.
It chronicles an idealistic, unnamed young black man's humiliations in the South and in Harlem, from campus life to street riots.
The grace and complexity of Ellison's prose was enriched by the depth of his ambition, his desire to follow the tradition of Mark Twain, Herman Melville and other 19th-century novelists.
"When I write, I am trying to make sense out of chaos," Ellison told The New York Times in 1966. "To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap. I am a novelist, not an activist. But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement."
The opening lines of the novel made clear Ellison's commitment to revealing the perspective of America's disenfranchised and shunned.
"I am an invisible man," he wrote. "No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
"Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me."
Ellison spent two decades working on his second novel, but lost most of the manuscript in a fire at his summer home. He once said that the political assassinations of the '60s, which seemed to mirror the worst nightmares of "Invisible Man," "really chilled me - slowed down the writing."
His two collections of essays, "Shadow and Act" (1964) and "Going to the Territory" (1986), complete his published work.
"Invisible Man" remains his most influential contribution to American letters, an intricate tale that offered an uncanny blueprint for the next two decades, from the civil rights movement to Malcolm X and the growth of Afrocentrism.
A 1965 poll of 200 authors, critics and editors pronounced it the most distinguished novel published in the preceding 20 years - "a veritable `Moby Dick' of the racial crisis," critic F.W. Dupee said.
by CNB