Rampersad begins his story by looking into Ellison's tumultuous childhood in the segregated Oklahoma City, where his mother raised him and his younger brother Herbert with the help of neighbors and friends (his father died early in Ellison's life when a shard of ice stabbed him in the stomach after lifting a block of ice). He recalls the difficulties of Jim Crow in Oklahoma; at one point, Ellison's mother was turned away from the city zoo with both her sons, embarrassed by the white security guard. Rampersad does not just focus on Ellison's career, but shows how Ellison's early years helped shape his literature.
When Ellison grows up and heads to college, Rampersad shows a life that closely reflected Ellison's fiction, especially his most famous novel Invisible Man. Ellison's time at Tuskegee, and his reasons for leaving the institution, shape how the narrator of Invisible Man will form his own identity. Rampersad sweats the small details, showing the progression Ellison took as he moved to Harlem in the 1930's and became a writer. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright directly influenced Ellison's desire to write a great novel, even though Ellison would later distance himself from these writers due to his changing political beliefs. Rampersad also tracks Ellison's political evolution, from Communist sympathizer in the 1930's to moderate Democrat in the 1960's and beyond. In Invisible Man, Ellison's narrator would make a similar political change, albeit on a smaller level. Indeed, Ellison's fiction was often closely linked to his own changes.
Rampersad's exhaustive research also reveals a man who was prone to arrogance and, as a result, was often viewed as out of touch with modern American literature, especially in the ever changing 1960's. While Ellison worked night and day on the novel that would rival Faulkner (that he ultimately never finished), a new perspective on race relations, especially among blacks, emerged. Ellison was stuck between two conflicting worlds: a white America that accepted Ellison and allowed him to move up in society, and a black America that accused Ellison of being an "Uncle Tom." Ellison never backed down; despite younger writers seeing him as out of touch with the struggles of the modern world, Ellison always believed that race relations were more complex than black versus white, and that African-American culture was distinctly American. As he aged and black radicalism subsided, many young scholars turned back to Ellison's words, and his view of America endures today.
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