entitled ``The Shadow and the Act'', which expanded upon his critique in ``Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity'' of the vicious and detrimental stereotypes rampant in mainstream American culture. Reviewing the book in 1965, R. W. B. Lewis said: ``Shadow and Act contains Ralph Ellison's real autobiography.... The experiences of writing Invisible Man and of vaulting on his first try ``over the parochial limits of most Negro fiction'' (as Richard G. Stern says in an interview), and, as a result, of being written about as a literary and sociological phenomenon, combined with sheer compositional difficulties, seem to have driven Ellison to search out the truths of his own past.
Richard G. Stern
Ellison