Collections of fugitive pieces suffer inevitably from certain disabilities: discontinuity, occasions that no longer interest, a journalistic thinness which only extensive revision can redeem, a revision that would alter the character of the enterprise. Only an interesting mind or presence justifies such a collection. Without the armor of scholarship (he must, after all, meet his deadlines), the writer has only his intelligence, his character and his wits to fall back on. He reveals himself perhaps more fully than on other occasions, and very few survive the test.

Ralph Ellison is among the few. He is a gifted man, but that is not the principal reason for whatever success these essays have. Actually, they are sometimes infelicitous, occasionally out of control: there is dross enough for the reviewer looking for trouble. The success of the essays consists in their revelation of an admirable man. Without the passion for self-dramatization that seems nowadays to be a necessary condition for “making it” on the literary scene, Ellison is purely devoted to the only task that justifies egotism, the task of understanding himself and his world in the hope that he will discover something of universal significance. Of another kind of egotism, Ellison has this to say: “There is an American Negro tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain. It is a tradition which abhors as obscene any trading on one's anguish for gain or sympathy.”