The Invisible Man. This novel is the only thing Ralph Ellison published during life; his essays, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, were published posthumously. An unnamed man, marginalized and overlooked by society simply because of the high lev

Westfield High School senior Brianna Guddemi becomes invisible for "Project 79 Invisible Man" WESTFIELD — After studying Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man," the seniors in Westfield High School’s Project ’79 program embarked on a mission to find out what it

Ralph Ellison has often been cited by literary scholars as one of the 20th century’s most tragic examples of writer’s block: after the immense success of 1952’s Invisible Man, the author lived for more than 40 years without ever publishing a second novel

SPINNING IN THE GRACE Posthumous record releases from The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur give rise to ethical questions The Notorious B.I.G.’s last album was titled Life After Death (Bad Boy, 1997), but one has to wonder whether the late rap star woul

Being labeled midcareer is acknowledging that this is the halftime show. The next retrospective is the post-mortem one. On the bright side for Ligon, it means he has been a well-regarded, museum-collected artist since his formative days in the 1980s. As

"What began as a credible protest against bank bailouts, crony capitalism and the like has, in large measure, been hijacked by crazies and criminals," It’s time to re-evaluate that rule and allow video review of close goaltending calls in a game’s decidi

The subject matter is Jamaicans of various classes and castes, passionately in and out of love. The style is a cool, faintly decorous prose, incorporating a witty, idiosyncratic Jamaican patois. Goodison's alchemy of standard and Jamaican English places

In conjunction with their reading of Ralph Ellison's ‘Invisible Man,’ several Westfield High School seniors in the Project ‘79 program attempted to disappear within the interior school surroundings. Westfield High School senior, Brianna Guddemi, disappea

Court Theatre's adaptation of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is a scathing portrait of racism built around the observation that the central character is invisible because the people he deals with can see only his color. But its scope goes beyond race to t

What a the literary greats can teach us about the fine points of make-believe "Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie."

Last fall Court Theatre gave us An Iliad and its nameless Poet—a lone singer, stowed away in some abandoned, urban hole-in-the-ground, who, miserable, weary, but compulsively articulate, kept us mesmerized while he poured out the epic of Achilles's rage.

Complex and stylistically daring, Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel "Invisible Man" remains among the most respected American artistic achievements of the 20th Century, and this production at the Court Theater in Chicago represents the work's first stage adapta

While far from perfect, many of Minnesota’s charter public schools are accomplishing much more than a Bloomberg article asserted. As Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat has noted, if we are to make considerable progress in reducing achievement gap

If Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" comes to any conclusions down there in his basement after a lifetime of confusion, disappointment and hurt, after a good long spin on the racially painted American carousel of the mid-20th century, he finally spits them

Teagle Bougere (left) and A.C. Smith star in "Invisible Man" at Court Theatre. Studs Terkel called race “the American obsession” — a persistent compulsion that is sometimes blatant, sometimes covert, but unquestionably deeply embedded in our national psy

One studio’s executives didn’t even show up for the screening. “Isn’t this their job?” Lucas says, astonished. “Isn’t their job at least to see movies? It’s not like some Sundance kid coming in there and saying, ‘I’ve got this little movie — would you se

For more than half a century, Ralph Ellison and his literary executors held tightly to the author’s Invisible Man, refusing all attempts to turn the beloved 1952 novel into a play or a film. When the lights go up on Court Theatre’s world premiere in Janu

January 14, 2012, 12:00 pm By DEB AMLEN SECOND SUNDAY PUZZLE — The author of today’s quote was one of the pre-eminent writers during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. Her books, short stories, plays and essays heavily influenced many of the h

Can you do a play about an invisible man? About an African-American whom others simply refuse to see? Ralph Ellison, it seems fair to surmise, thought probably not. Not well, anyway. Not something that would do justice to the moment, shortly after the en