Placing Invisible Man within the canon of either the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement is difficult. It owes allegiance to both and neither at the same time. Interestingly enough, Ellison's own resistance to being pigeonholed by his peers bubbled over into his statement to Irving Howe about what he deemed to be a relative vs. an ancestor. He says, to Howe: "...perhaps you will understand when I say that he did not influence me if I point out that while one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as an artist, choose one's 'ancestors.' Wright was, in this sense, a 'relative'; Hemingway an 'ancestor.' " And it was this idea of "playing the field," so to speak, not being "all-in," that lead to some of Ellison's more staunch critics. The aforementioned Howe, in "Black Boys and Native Sons," but also the likes of other black writers such as John Oliver Killens, who once denounced "Invisible Man" by saying: “The Negro people need Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man like we need a hole in the head or a stab in the back. ... It is a vicious distortion of Negro life."