It's Fascinating How Life Works.

You Can Say I Had A Severe Case Of 'roots' Envy. I Wanted To Be Like Alex Haley, And I Wanted To Be Able To... Do My Family Tree Back To The Slave Ship And Then Reverse The Middle Passage, As I Like To Put It, And Find The Tribe Or Ethnic Group That I Was From In Africa.

My Producers And I Worked With These Consultants And Came Up With Seventy [stories] Which We Think Are Exemplary Of The Larger Arc Of African-american History Between 1513 And 2013. We Covered Half A Millennium, And It's Amazing.

The Genius Is Making A Way Out Of No Way.

So, The Kind Of Precious Memories About Being Black For My Generation Won't Exist For My Kids' And Grandkids' Generations Unless We Preserve Them Through Fiction, Through Film, Through Comic Books, And Every Other Form Of Media We Can Possibly Utilize To Perpetuate The Story Of The Great African-american People.

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.