Don Wycliff.

What's a jungle bunny like you doing in these parts?" Gore Vidal is said to have uttered that insult to Ralph Ellison in 1959, when Ellison was living in Saul Bellow's home in overwhelmingly white Dutchess County, New York, and teaching at Bard College.

In his book Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 657 pp.), Arnold Rampersad attributes the recollection of the offensive question to Ellison's friends, Renee and Ted Weiss. And while such a remark would have caused at least a little scene, even in that relatively benighted time, Rampersad says nothing of how Ellison--a notoriously proud, prickly, and often angry man--responded.

A grievous omission, and one made all the more grievous by the fact that the Vidal incident echoed a scene out of the first pages of Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man (Vintage, $14.95, 608 pp.).

One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the
near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at
him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize.... And in my
outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat ... when it
occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far
as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare!

In fairness, omissions of any magnitude are exceedingly rare in Rampersad's long, well-researched, and copiously documented biography of probably the greatest one-hit wonder in the history of American literature.

Ralph Waldo Ellison could be said to have spent the first half of his life (from his birth in 1913 to the publication of Invisible Man in 1952) producing his masterwork, and the second half (from 1952 until his death in 1994) struggling to produce another novel that would live up to the great expectations created by the first.

More than one critic has called Invisible Man the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century. Rare is the list that doesn't put it among the top ten. It remains the only novel that was indisputably Ellison's.

(Another novel, Juneteenth, was assembled after Ellison's death by his literary executor John F. Callahan from more than a thousand pages written by Ellison during the last forty-one years of his life. So Juneteenth was unquestionably written by Ellison, but it is not clear that it was authored by him.)

The Vidal incident, while given no special emphasis by Rampersad, seems emblematic of so much in Ellison's life and character as a black--or, to use his favored term, Negro--American. One suspects Ellison did not react angrily or behave demonstratively, for if he had, his friends would have remembered it and Rampersad would have recorded it. More likely, he found a way to brush off the insult from the crude, uncivilized Vidal.

Rampersad suggests that once Ellison had achieved success with Invisible Man and began to achieve acceptance among successful and/or wealthy whites, he reserved his indignation and outrage mainly for blacks--whether college students in the grip of a fervor for "Black Power," or young writers trying to give expression to an American reality that their experience suggested was irredeemably racist, or even a onetime friend and mentor such as Langston Hughes.

Ellison seemed to see his role in life as the Jackie Robinson of American letters--except that in his case, his duties included making sure no others followed him through the door he had opened. Toni Morrison may have summed it up best in an observation quoted by Rampersad: "My suspicion was that he considered himself an exception. He got to speak for us but he did not like to be identified with us." Ironically--and sadly--it may have been that refusal to refresh himself in black life as it was changing in the decades after Invisible Man that deprived Ellison of the vision, the insight, the juice that he needed to complete a second novel during his lifetime.

Not that Invisible Man wouldn't have been triumph enough all by itself. As complex and layered as the "Negro" and American cultures it attempted to illuminate, it is a novel that repays every rereading. (I first read the book when I was twenty, and reread it annually until I was fifty.) It and its creator more than merited all the accolades that were heaped upon them, and just as no American student should end his or her schooling without having read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, none should do so without having read Invisible Man.

Don Wycliff, former public editor of the Chicago Tribune, teaches media criticism at the University of Notre Dame.