Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important and controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides an introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features essays by leading scholars, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays reveal alternative dimensions of Ellison's art radiating out from Invisible Man into other domains - technology, political theory, law, photography, music, religion - and recover the compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison's political and artistic vision. Since Ellison's death his published oeuvre has been expanded by several major volumes - his collected essays, the fragment of a novel, Juneteenth (1999), letters and short stories - examined here in the context of his life and work. Students and scholars of Ellison and of American and African-American literature will find this an invaluable and accessible guide.

The essays in this collection treat the whole of Ralph Ellison's body of work, including his famous novel "Invisible Man." The volume confronts Ellison the man of ideas, essayist and short story writer, as well as the material in his posthumously published novel "Juneteenth."

Addressing topics such as black nationalism, racism, and identity, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, first published in 1952, has become a primary text in the discussion of racial politics and black identity in America. This compelling edition examines Ellison's Invisible Man through the lens of race, providing readers with a series of essays that expand upon topics such as black radicalism, racial justice, and sexual taboo, as it relates to the novel. The text also features contemporary perspectives on race, urging readers to link the themes of the text to the issues of the present.

This volume includes previously published essays that clarify her religious ideas, her narrative technique, her use of humor, and the regional and social context of her fiction. Original essays discuss the religious context of such stories as "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People."

Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love interprets O'Conner's perplexing fiction on its own terms. By stepping back from prevailing controversies, this seminal study takes the pleasure of turning to the short stories and novels themselves and forming an impression of them while seeking the answers to such questions as they necessarily suggest themselves.

While Flannery O'Connor is hailed as one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century American south, few appreciate O'Connor as a philosopher as well. In Return to Good and Evil, Henry T. Edmondson introduces us to a remarkable thinker who uses fiction to confront and provoke us with the most troubling moral questions of modern existence.