Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back 200 or 300 years and actually populate your family tree with real people who had names and documents. They had customs, characteristics that, unbeknownst to you, you have inherited. Almost through osmosis it has been passed down to you.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.

Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography.