In the Territory.(Biography)

November 29, 1967, a tart, sunny day in Plainfield, Massachusetts, some thirty miles north of Smith College, in the Berkshires: the small town's most famous inhabitant that historic afternoon was not, as one would expect, a New England patrician with an ancestral foot planted firmly on Plymouth Rock. Rather, it was a fifty-four-year-old well-dressed

black Oklahoman, the owner of a two-story house on Lincoln Hill Road, who had been named for another New England writer: Ralph Waldo Ellison.

Ellison's first--and only completed--novel, the 1952 surrealist epic "Invisible Man," is now regarded by many as one of the ur-texts on urban black masculinity. (From the prologue: "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. . . . I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.") But when it was first published its critics in the white literary establishment emphasized not the book's specificity but its broad appeal. In Commentary, Saul Bellow wrote, "There is a way for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr. Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone."

Certainly by 1967 no one would have referred to Ellison as a "minority" writer. (Except in the way that he himself used the term, in a 1955 Paris Review interview: "All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.") "Invisible Man" had beat out Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" to win the 1953 National Book Award. In 1965, a group of prominent critics, writers, and publishers had voted it the "most distinguished" postwar American novel. By the time Ellison died, in 1994, the novel had inspired more than twenty book-length critical studies. Despite the accolades, though, every time Ellison received another prize for "Invisible Man" he had to face the inevitable question: where was his second novel? The move to Plainfield, in 1967, with his wife, Fanny, was supposed to provide him with an environment in which to finish the book, later titled "Juneteenth." But, as Arnold Rampersad, the scholar and biographer of Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson, reports in his startling, illuminating, and sad biography, "Ralph Ellison" (Knopf; $35), although the Ellisons had bought a small estate there, Fanny had trouble prying her husband away from Manhattan. That November day in 1967 was one of the few that Ellison actually spent on the property.

According to Rampersad, two handymen showed up in the afternoon to replace some doors on the toolshed. The Ellisons left to run some errands. Returning home after the handymen had gone, they saw smoke billowing from their house. The manuscript of "Juneteenth" was destroyed in the fire. In the years that followed, Rampersad writes, Ellison and his wife "soon fell back reflexively on the fire when asked about the delay" with the second novel. At one point, Fanny even blamed the blaze on racist arsonists. On other occasions, she spoke about having to be "restrained by firemen from rushing into the burning house to rescue the manuscript, which she could see clearly, so very clearly, through a window as the flames closed in." It is uncertain how much of the book had been written when it was lost, but the tragedy became the defining event of the latter part of Ellison's life.

Ellison had an American penchant for complaint. Born on March 1, 1913, he was the second son of Lewis and Ida Ellison. (Their first, Alfred, had died in infancy. Ellison's younger brother, Herbert, was born in 1916.) The couple had met in Lewis's home town, Abbeville, South Carolina--Ida, who was born in Georgia, had gone to school there--and were married in 1910; the same year, they, like thousands of other prewar blacks, left the South to stake their claim in "the territory," settling in Oklahoma. "Divided and united by history, Oklahoma was culturally the wild West, the Southwest, and the Old South," Rampersad writes. "It was ancient but also brazenly new." As an adult, Ellison, forever the proud Oklahoman, often cited his upbringing among blacks, whites, Jews, ...