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INTERVIEWER
Do you think a reader unacquainted with [African-American] folklore can properly understand your work?
ELLISON
Yes, I think so. It’s like jazz; there’s no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it. We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even “Little Red Riding Hood.” The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. I noticed, incidentally, that the Germans, having no special caste assumptions concerning American Negroes, dealt with my work simply as a novel. I think the Americans will come to view it that way in twenty years—if it’s around that long.
Copyright 1955 by Ralph Ellison. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc. on behalf of the Author.
This interview appears courtesy of the William Morris Agency. |
 Download a PDF of the full interview |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, André Malraux, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stendhal, Waters E. Turpin, Mark Twain, Richard Wright |
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