Voices for Truth: Ralph Ellison

Celebrate Black History Month by introducing yourself to one of the most acclaimed works by an African American author: Invisible Man, written by Ralph Ellison over five years and published in 1952. The National Book Award was one of many honors the novel earned. As we discuss selections from the beginning of the book, we’ll consider its importance for the early 1950s and our own time.

Suggested reading: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952), Prologue and Chapter One.

About the Facilitators:

• Dr. John Getz is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Xavier University and has been volunteering for the Friends of Harriet Beecher Stowe House for many years.

We’ll study the writings of many authors from the 19th and 20th centuries to determine

• how they discovered their voices,
• the forms they chose for expressing their voices,
• the needs both personal and societal to which they put those expressions,
• the effects their work had,
• how we can develop and enlist our own voices in service of our own values.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is our exemplar voice for truth. During her eighteen years in Cincinnati as a young adult (1832-1850), she discovered her voice as a writer, and in 1851, she decided to devote it to the anti-slavery cause. Horrified by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she wrote to editor Gamaliel Bailey: "Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject [slavery], and I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force of its exciting power. But now I feel that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."The result, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the blockbuster novel that awakened many Northerners to the horrors of slavery and helped create the change of heart that would allow the Union to stand firm when the South ceded over slavery.

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Host or Publisher Harriet Beecher Stowe House