"I was preoccupied with books by black people that approached the subject, but I always missed some intimacy, some direction, some voice. Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright-all of whose books I admire enormously-I didn't feel were telling me something. I thought they were saying something about it or us that revealed something about us to you, to others, to white people, to men. Just in terms of the style, I missed something in the fiction that I felt in a real sense in the music and poetry of black artists. When I began writing I was writing as though there was nobody in the world but me and the characters, as though I was talking to them, or us, and it just had a different sound to it."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesExistentialists
Original Language: English
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1981 interview in Conversations with Toni Morrison edited by Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie (1994)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Ellison
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Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American writer and academic known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.
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