Mark Greif writes:

Part of the exquisite painfulness of reading this biography lies in its unwillingness to say: Ellison really was better than other people, and his novel really was uniquely the best, and yet it was not entirely shameful for him to become a public-minded person, and an establishment figure, and maybe even something other than a novelist, finally. Rampersad’s is an eminently ‘balanced’ biography – a cool portrait of a man who did many things admirably and nothing terribly wrong. We do learn that Ellison was not generous. Frequently the first black man to break a barrier, he did not try to carry others along with him. He may have disappointed himself, too, over the decades, as he continued to insist his second novel was nearly done. Rampersad provides exhaustive details of what is portrayed as a flaw in Ellison’s psychology: his compulsive institution-joining, entering the halls of white power as a distraction from writing. This is a portrait of a novelist too eager to belong.

(LRB 1 November 2007)

Knopf | hardback 657 pp. |ISBN: 9780375408274