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Ellis, Trey (b. 1962, Washington, D.C.) Trey Ellis’s first two novels, Platitudes (1988) and Home Repairs (1993), satirize the petty concerns of the new black bourgeoisie even as they celebrate the fact that this same bourgeoisie has attained a new size and affluence. His third novel, Right Here, Right Now (1999), lampoons the self-help industry that exploded in the 1980s and 1990s. All of these novels, along with Ellis’s short stories, are implicit expressions of Ellis’s essay,“The New Black Aesthetic” (see separate article) which, as a partial response to the strictures of Black Aesthetic of the 1960s, argues that no racial label, whether foisted upon African Americans by whites or fellow African Americans, will suffice to describe the full spectrum of black culture. Its thesis is almost identical to Langston Hughes’s famous 1925 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (Ellis even quotes a key phrase from Hughes’s conclusion) in its assertion of the artist’s independence from aesthetics guided more by politics than the artist’s desire to express his interpretation of reality.^*

This philosophy is perhaps best expressed in Ellis’s debut novel, Platitudes, a parody of conventions or clichés in recent African American literature. Ellis’s narrative is a mock Künstlerroman in which a young black artist, Dewayne Wellington, struggles to tell the story of his social, racial, and artistic awakenings through the eyes of his postmodern subjectivity, even as another, female artist, Isshee Ayam cajoles him to see himself as part of a traditional black community by writing his story in a rural context that focuses more on black women. This particular convention parodies the subject matter and settings through which Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison achieved some of their greatest literary triumphs.^*

The narrative’s tension rests upon the male protagonist’s desire to write his story free of the platitudes of contemporary fiction, a desire that is continually undermined as he finds himself using every available cliché, but only for the sake of commenting upon the impossibility of originality when every previous literary movement has already preempted a new aesthetic. Thus, for example, the narrators continually call attention to the process and impetuses behind the narrative’s formation, as when Dewayne writes one chapter about a scene in a movie theater in which signs on the movie screen reflect the interactions between the narrative’s main characters.^* Ellis portrays the socialization of post–Civil Rights African Americans as being closely linked to both the new black middle-class dynamic that has emerged in the last three decades and to the fixtures of mainstream popular and intellectual cultures. Ellis thus lampoons such icons as standardized tests, popular music, and contemporary literary theories for their tendency to be blindly accepted and followed without thought to their social relevance.

If Ellis was attempting to create a space for a new generation of black writers in Platitudes, his second novel, Home Repairs, is less ambitious. Both books are novels of growth, but the latter is more a bildungsroman than a Künstlerroman, more autobiographical, and more comedic than satirical. As a result, Home Repairs also lacks some of the first novel’s sharp wit and thematic focus and seems less developed than its predecessor. Arguably, its greatest value is as an example of the New Black Aesthetic that Ellis champions, to the extent that Ellis’s protagonist, Austin McMillan represents the type of “cultural mulatto” discussed in Ellis’s essay.

Ellis’s third novel, Right Here, Right Now, shares only the epistolary format with the earlier works. Its extended satire on the self-help, inspirational-speaker, and lurid talk-show industries, with a touch of the O. J. Simpson controversy thrown into the plot, is both biting and successful. Narrator Ashton Robinson is an African American inspirational speaker who eventually begins his own process of self-discovery. As did its predecessors, Right Here, Right Now received a number of favorable reviews.

Ellis has also written a number of short stories. The best of these is “Guess Who’s Coming to Seder,” originally published in Black American Literature Forum in 1989. “Guess” is a hilarious send-up of both Sidney Poitier’s famous 1967 film and the state of black-Jewish relations in the late 1980s. He has also written several screenplays and teleplays, including (uncredited) The Inkwell (1994) and The Tuskegee Airmen (1995). To date, little has been written on Ellis outside of book reviews, and he has not yet been assigned extensively, partly because his earliest work was out of print for almost a decade. Nevertheless, Ellis may easily be considered a key figure in the African American literature of the last twenty years, if only for articulating a crucial aspect of the issues captivating the post–Civil Rights generation.

Ellison, Ralph (b. 1914, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; d. 1994, New York City) Ralph Ellison has inarguably attained the status of a giant of African American and American literature, for both the work he published during his lifetime and the extensive second novel he never actually completed and published. Until the late 1990s, Ralph Ellison’s literary reputation rested primarily upon his National Book Award–winning first novel, Invisible Man (1952), a widely acknowledged American classic and an indispensable landmark in African American literature. Ellison’s many essays on diverse subjects have been almost equally as successful and influential, with each offering further evidence of the universalist thesis that has guided Ellison’s work since the 1940s. The story of a young African American man who searches for the meaning of his invisibility to both himself and the greater American society, Invisible Man is considered one of the most accomplished and important novels in the post–World War II period, a distinction bestowed upon the work in a Book Week magazine poll in 1965 and reinforced innumerable times ever since via its many accolades and popularity in high school and college courses.

Ellison’s work has emerged from the sentiment expressed in Invisible Man’s closing line: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” This is an expression of the argument that African Americans are at the very center of American culture, that they speak, write, and perform from it, and that their destiny is inextricably tied to that of the rest of the nation. The novel’s unnamed, picaresque protagonist’s search for identity underscores the argument, as he slowly realizes that his visibility depends upon his acknowledgment of every aspect of his past, in much the same way that Americans, whether of African descent or not, must acknowledge and confront their interdependence in pursuit of the nation’s democratic ideals. This same notion brought Ellison a great deal of criticism from many quarters, especially the American left wing and American Black Nationalists in the 1960s, who thought the novel’s ambivalence and ambiguity were attempts to dodge the necessity of political action. Although this reading has been criticized several times, not least by Ellison himself,^* it is one of the major divisions among the novel’s critics and readers. It was during the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, that Invisible Man truly became canonized within the African American literary tradition via numerous journal articles, book-length studies, and anthologies.

While Invisible Man inarguably thrust Ellison into literary stardom, the delay in publishing his second novel caused no small amount of consternation for both his critics and admirers, and it tormented Ellison as well. This frustration was driven in part by Ellison’s rare, yet widely heralded publication of several excerpts from the enormous manuscript and the fact that he had lost a substantial portion of the only copy of his manuscript—over three hundred and sixty pages, by Ellison’s own estimation—to a house fire in 1967. Although Ellison labored intermittently until the end of his life to complete his magnum opus, he died in 1994 with over two thousand manuscript pages left unfinished and without any clear indication of the shape they were ultimately supposed to take. The manuscript promised to be an even more ambitious meditation on race and American identity than Invisible Man, one that would highlight the common identity that Americans of all backgrounds share, despite differences that often seem insurmountable. In the absence of Ellison’s directions, though, the possibility of this novel ever seeing light died with him. Nonetheless, Ellison’s friend and literary executor, John F. Callahan, undertook the monumental task of organizing parts of Ellison’s countless chapters, notes, and vignettes into Juneteenth (1999; see separate entry), which received extensive praise, as well as great controversy, particularly due to the inevitable difficulties of posthumously extracting an author’s intentions.

Ellison also wrote and published eleven short stories during his lifetime. Eight of these were published before Invisible Man, two were published several years after the novel, and another in the 1960s. Most of these have been reprinted in various publications over the years, but the single best source of them would be Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), edited by John Callahan. While Ellison was working on the second book, he released eight excerpts from the work in progress, many of which were fine short stories in their own right. Most of these have been incorporated into Juneteenth.

Scholarship on Ellison is among the most extensive for any African American author; Invisible Man is, arguably, the preeminent novel of African American literature in the twentieth century. Scholarly studies of Ellison’s short fiction are not as plentiful, but the relative few that exist are of high quality. Most study the short fiction in conjunction with Invisible Man. The first to be mentioned are Ellison’s own essay collections, which contain essays and speeches that address or expand many of the issues in his fiction, including Invisible Man and its reception: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). Due to the fanfare surrounding Juneteenth’s publication, most of the contemporary reviews of the novel serve as excellent scholarly studies. Other key critical works include: Kimberly W. Benston, ed., Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison (1987), which contains an updated version of Robert G. O’Meally’s exhaustive bibliography of works by or on Ellison as of 1986; Jacqueline Covo, The Blinking Eye: Ralph Waldo Ellison and His American, German, and Italian Critics, 1952–1971 (1974); Robert G. O’Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980); J. M. Reilly, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Invisible Man (1970); Edith Schor, Visible Ellison: A Study of Ralph Ellison’s Fiction (1993), which includes an annotated bibliography of sources on Ellison and issues related to his fiction; Joseph T. Skerrett Jr., ed. “Ralph Ellison and the Example of Richard Wright,” Studies in Short Fiction 15, no. 2 (Spring 1978), 145–53. The March 1970 issue of CLA Journal (number 13) is devoted entirely to Ellison.

Everett, Percival (b. 1956, Fort Gordon, Georgia) A graduate of the University of Miami and Brown University, Percival Everett is one of the better-kept secrets among contemporary African American authors. He has published fourteen novels since the early 1980s. Virtually all of them have attracted considerable praise, but few have received anything close to the attention they deserve. His first work, Suder (1983), brought him a D. H. Lawrence fellowship from the University of New Mexico, while God’s Country (1994) helped garner a Lila Wallace–Readers Digest Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In 1992, Everett was William Robertson Coe Chair in American Studies, University of Wyoming. His other works include Walk Me to the Distance (1985), Cutting Lisa (1986), The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair (short stories; 1987), For Her Dark Skin (1989), Zulus (1990; winner of the New American Writing Award), The One That Got Away (1992), Big Picture (short stories; winner of the PEN/Oakland–Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature) and Watershed (both 1996; Watershed was republished in paperback form in 2003), Frenzy (1997), Glyph (1999), Grand Canyon, Inc., and Erasure (both 2001; Erasure won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction and the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction). In the 1990s, Everett began publishing his short stories and novel excerpts frequently in Callaloo, one of the leading literary journals.

Glyph brought Everett an unprecedented amount of critical attention for its ingenious satire of academia and contemporary trends or fads in critical literary theory. These notices led in turn to extensive attention for Erasure, an extended satire of faddishness in literary publishing, especially in the case of African American authors. Ironically, the novel’s lampooning of simplistic categories and of African Americans’ occasional fetishization of “authenticity”—literary, cultural, or otherwise—instantly made Erasure into a significant work of African American fiction and probably helped God’s Country and Watershed, two of his earlier novels, be reprinted in paperback for the first time in 2003. Although the same courtesy has yet to be extended to the rest of Everett’s corpus, interest in his more recent novels seems likely to correct this state of affairs, as are future works he has planned.

Everett’s narrative craft is frequently reminiscent of Toni Cade Bambara’s, to the extent that he is deeply conversant with different narrative voices and outlooks, although he is really a contemporary of Michelle Cliff, Randall Kenan, and Clarence Major in terms of his style and outlook on history. Everett’s mixing of genres and concern with the conflict between tradition and modernity also takes a clear cue from the innovations of such literary modernists as William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray. In keeping with Everett’s eschewing of the numerous categories frequently assigned authors, it should be noted that his individual works always transcend the categories in which critics and publishers normally place them, due perhaps to the satirical and comedic elements within them. Glyph and Erasure, for example, lampoon intellectual fads, thereby disrupting the academy’s narrative of itself, while God’s Country, Watershed, Grand Canyon, Inc., and The One That Got Away undermine versions of American history—especially the Western or frontier narrative—that ultimately serve the purpose of maintaining the supremacy of both racism and capitalism, especially with regard to African Americans and various Native American peoples. Suder begins—superficially—as a baseball novel about a washed-up player, but it quickly morphs into a farcical quest for identity and meaning that involves everything from the drug trade to jazz and innumerable pop-culture references. Walk Me to the Distance uses a Hemingwayesque prose style for a study of eccentric characters struggling to make a life in a Wyoming backwater, while Zulus mixes postapocalyptic science fiction and comedy into disciplined, yet experimental fiction that compares well with the work of Samuel R. Delany. Everett’s short stories cover all of the ground found in his novels, with all of the inevitable economy of form and structure one expects from the mode.

* Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989).

* Some of Ayam’s titles: “Chillun o’de Lawd, Hog Jowl Junction, and My Big Ol’Feets Gon’ Stomp Dat Devil Down”: see Trey Ellis, Platitudes (New York: Vintage, 1988), 110.

* Ellis, Platitudes, 150–51.

* See Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in his Shadow and Act (1964), 107–43; and T.V. Reed, “Invisible Movements, Black Powers: Double Vision and Trickster Politics in Invisible Man,” in Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 58–86.