Ellison’s Hemingway

ABSTRACT:The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, published in 2019, along with the essays in Shadow and Act (1964), reveal Ernest Hemingway to have been a major preoccupation for the author of Invisible Man. While Ellison did acknowledge that Hemingway once served as “the true father-as-artist of so many of us who came to writing during the late thirties,” Hemingway’s influence on Ellison was, however, neither simple nor direct. Instead, Hemingway allowed Ellison a way to think about “questions of influence”: about technique, about producing emotion, and, above all, about how an artist might grapple with America’s “great moral theme.”