[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 48 (Thursday, April 28, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 28, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                        TRIBUTE TO RALPH ELLISON

                                 ______


                           HON. KWEISI MFUME

                              of maryland

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, April 28, 1994

  Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the writer of 
one of the greatest and influential American novels. Ralph Ellison, 
author of ``Invisible Man,'' died at his home, at the age of 80, on 
April 16.
  Mr. Ellison was born on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City. His father, 
a construction foreman, died when Ralph was 3. His mother was a 
domestic worker. Ralph Ellison had intended to be a composer, yet the 
lack of money necessary for proper training led him to discover and 
pursue his love and talent for writing instead.
  Mr. Ellison evolved as a writer studying the works of such greats as 
T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Gertrude 
Stein, and Dostoyevski. The wealth of his experience as transmitted 
through his novel has been a major influence on later generations of 
writers. He has made it clear that ``[y]ou don't write out of your skin 
* * *, [y]ou write out of your imagination,'' and ``[t]he imagination 
is integrative.''
  Published in 1952, ``Invisible Man'' transcends generational and 
racial barriers. The African-American narrator does not merely 
represent blacks, but any social group whose humanity has become 
invisible to those around it. Unlike most protagonists of African-
American fiction up to that time, he has intellectual depth and 
ambition. ``Invisible Man'' transforms the powerless victim into a 
participant, the vagrant into an explorer, and the mindless drifter 
into a philosopher.
  ``Invisible Man'' advocates for the American culture. As the narrator 
says, ``America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and 
let it remain so.'' Mr. Ellison was an integrationist, but not a 
conformist. He believed in the preservation of identity through the 
acceptance of the cultures of which we have evolved, but never a denial 
of the culture from which we have come.
  Mr. Ellison never published another novel, though he could never stop 
writing. He published two nonfiction collections, ``Shadow and Act'' in 
1964 and ``Going to the Territory'' in 1986. His second novel was 
destroyed after a fire in 1967. He never abandoned that novel and 
proceeded to reconstruct it by talking to those friends who had read 
excerpts and from sections that had been published in literary 
journals. The manuscript, over 1,000 pages long, was almost complete at 
the time of his death. We can only hope that this novel, too, be 
published, so we may be blessed further by Ralph Ellison's literary 
genius.

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