Wrestling With the Left

InWrestling with the Left, Barbara Foley presents a penetrating analysis of the creation ofInvisible Man. In the process she sheds new light not only on Ralph Ellisonrs"s celebrated novel but also on his early radicalism and the relationship between African American writers and the left during the early years of the cold war. Foley scrutinized thousands of pages of drafts and notes for the novel, as well as the authorrs"s early journalism and fiction, published and unpublished. While Ellison had cut his ties with the Communist left by the time he beganInvisible Manin 1945, Foley argues that it took him nearly seven years to wrestle down his leftist consciousness (and conscience) and produce the carefully patterned cold war text that won the National Book Award in 1953 and has since become a widely taught American classic. She interweaves her account of the novelrs"s composition with the history of American Communism, linking Ellisonrs"s political and artistic transformations to his distress at the Communistsrs" wartime policies, his growing embrace of American nationalism, his isolation from radical friends, and his recognition, as the cold war heated up, that an explicitly leftist writer could not expect to have a viable literary career. Foley suggests that by expunging a leftist vision fromInvisible Man, Ellison rendered his novel not only less radical but also less humane than it might otherwise have been.

Barbara Foley is Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro; Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941, also published by Duke University Press; and Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction.