When I was invited not long ago to contribute to a volume of essays honoring the achievements of Ralph Ellison, I very much wanted to add my voice to the tributes being assembled for an old friend and a writer of major stature. But I hesitated at first because, in the years since Invisible Man had been published, I had lost touch with the new wave of Afro-American literature in which Ellison now takes so prominent a place. But then, remembering his love for, and familiarity with, the writings of Dostoevsky, it occurred to me that I could perhaps combine my knowledge of the Russian author with the desire publicly to express all my admiration of Ellison’s achievement. With this idea in mind, I began to re-read his book, and was delighted to discover (or rediscover what had probably been forgotten) that my choice of subject was not as arbitrary as I had feared it might be. For in focusing on the relation between the two writers, I was only following a lead given by Ellison himself.

In his essay “The World and the Jug,” Ralph Ellison makes an important distinction between what he calls his “relatives” and his “ancestors.” Irving Howe had criticized him for not being enough of a “protest writer” to satisfy Howe’s conception of what a Negro writer should be, Howe’s ideal at the time being the highly politicized Richard Wright. In explaining why Wright had not influenced him in any significant fashion, despite