KU News Release

Biographer Arnold Rampersad to give lecture about Ralph Ellison on Sept. 27

Arnold Rampersad

LAWRENCE — Arnold Rampersad, acclaimed author and scholar, will speak on “The Enigma of Ralph Ellison” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27, at the Spencer Museum of Art auditorium at the University of Kansas. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Rampersad’s latest book, “Ralph Ellison: A Biography,” has been described as the definitive account of the writer whose novel, “The Invisible Man,” won the 1953 National Book Award.

Chancellor Robert Hemenway will introduce Rampersad at the Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Department of English and the Hall Center for the Humanities.

Rampersad is the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in Humanities and professor of English at Stanford University and was a 1991 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. He shares with Ellison a love of 19th century American writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Melville and Twain, as well as modern American authors.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison has said, “Ralph Ellison’s place in American literature demands a biography that is as eloquent, thorough and wise as its subject. This is it. The book represents a flawless match of biographer and subject. In Arnold Rampersad’s hands we fathom both the burden and measure of Ellison’s brilliance.”

A literary critic early in his academic career, Rampersad subsequently earned acclaim as a biographer. His books include “The Art and Imagination of W.E.B Du Bois” (Harvard); the two-volume biography “The Life of Langston Hughes” (Oxford); “Days of Grace: A Memoir” (Knopf) and “Jackie Robinson: A Biography” (Knopf). He edited “Collected Poems of Langston Hughes” (Knopf); the two-volume edition of the works of Richard Wright published by the Library of America; and “The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry” (Oxford). He and Shelley Fisher Fishkin were editors of the “Race and American Culture” series for Oxford University Press. Rampersad is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophy Society.

Another book about Ellison, “Conversations with Ralph Ellison” by Maryemma Graham, KU professor of English, and Amritjit Singh, was published by the University of Mississippi Press in 1995.

Rampersad’s lecture is among the public events planned around the Spencer Museum of Art’s exhibition celebrating “Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist,” through Dec. 2.

More about Ralph Ellison (1913-1994):

Born in Oklahoma City, Ellison’s father named his oldest son for the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was 3 when his father died, leaving his mother to support two young sons by cleaning homes and offices. After graduating from high school, Ellison hopped a freight train to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to study music. In 1936, he went to New York City, where he met Langston Hughes and, later, Richard Wright, who encouraged him to write. In 1942, Ellison became managing editor of the Negro Quarterly. His novel, “Invisible Man,” won the 1953 National Book Award. The competition that year included Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” Ellison, an Oklahoma native, was 39 at the time. In addition to writing and teaching, Ellison served on committees in Washington, D.C., and had a role in the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and a National Medal of the Arts in 1985. Ellison’s nonfiction books are “Shadow and Act,” a collection of essays and interviews that appeared in 1964, and “Going to the Territory,” a collection of essays published in 1986. His unfinished novel, “Juneteenth,” edited by John F. Callahan, was published in 1999. He spent two years as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago and New York University and was a trustee of the New School for Social Research in New York and Bennington College in Vermont.

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