On 19 March 1952 Albert Erskine, then senior editor at Random House, sent out around a dozen advance copies of Ralph Ellison's highly anticipated novel Invisible Man to a carefully selected list of his former editees, friends, and professional associates. Accompanying these copies was a short letter, concluding that the work was

The sending of advance copies to people considered “intelligent reviewers” was standard editorial practice of the time, and a promotional technique that Erskine would utilize throughout his long career.Footnote ² It was also highly effective, attracting a host of positive notices from significant figures for Ellison and establishing some valuable and lifelong contacts.

This mailout, however, was only one of the many duties that Erskine performed for Ellison before, during, and after the publication of Invisible Man. Over the course of a personal and professional relationship that spanned almost fifty years from their first contact at Reynal and Hitchcock in 1944 to Erskine's death in 1993, the two men would work closely together on all of Ellison's writing. From reading aloud from the drafts of Invisible Man in Erskine's Westport home in 1951 through the collecting and ordering of essays for Going to the Territory (1986) and arguing within Random House for reprints of Ellison's work to managing his author's finances, Erskine clearly conceived of the role of the literary editor as a wide-ranging and deeply important one. In this article I deploy letters, drafts, and other material drawn from both Ellison's archive in the Library of Congress and Erskine's archive at the University of Virginia to explore how Erskine, as a white editor at a powerful international publisher, conceived of his role in shepherding to market and marketing what he saw as a major and experimental literary work by an African American author.

I locate this focus in an emerging body of critical work on the literary editor and publisher which has developed considerably since the turn of the millennium.Footnote ³ The common origin point of this body of work is early criticism by John Sutherland, and especially his view of a text as “a social product.”Footnote ⁴ Sutherland's work underpins Tim Groenland's more recent depiction of the literary editor as

Erskine's identification and championing of Ellison as a “literary talent,” the work the editor did between 1944 and 1952 to bring Invisible Man to a “publishable form,” and his role in making the “key decisions” on how to market – how to shape understanding of – Ellison's work is my contribution to Groenland's enlarging of “our sense of the ‘social and institutional event’ of literature” that emerges from including the editor in the study of the book.Footnote ⁶

Equally significant here is my examination of Erskine's attempts to shape the reception, understanding, and positioning – both within Random House and in the wider field of American literature – of Ellison and his work. In this I draw upon John B. Thompson's idea that “good publishers … are market-makers in a world where it is attention, not content, that is scarce.”Footnote ⁷ Or, as John Guillory has it, Erskine's marketing of Invisible Man is a kind of “canon formation,” a process that is “best understood as a problem in the constitution and distribution of cultural capital.”Footnote ⁸ Erskine, as an editor at a prestigious international publishing firm, held, first, the keys to publication for Ellison. But more significantly, Erskine also held access to the ways and means by which he carefully worked to ensure that Ellison accrued the right kind and amount of cultural capital to position Invisible Man as an important work of American fiction.

There are additional complexities within the editorial relationship between Erskine and Ellison. As many theorists of the publishing industry have pointed out, the authorial–editorial relationship is to some extent inevitably unequal in favour of the editor. This inevitable inequality of power results from editors’ and publishers’ exclusive access to the “means of literary production”: the technical, financial, and social apparatus of the international publishing firm.Footnote ⁹ However, Erskine's work with Ellison, as a white editor working with an African American writer, was also freighted by the troubled racial politics of the 1950s United States. Key especially here is John Young's question of “how to account for authors lacking a significant say in how their works would be produced,” a gap in scholarship that “represents … the untapped potential of contemporary textual scholarship: a chance to broaden the conception of the ‘social’ to include not only minority writers themselves, but the cultural contexts in which their work develops.”Footnote ¹⁰ My examination of Erskine's work with Ellison provides a window into precisely this kind of contextual relationship. It would have been easy for Erskine to allow Random House to market Invisible Man as simply a “race book,” and Ellison himself as what Lawrence Jackson calls “an authentic Negro.”Footnote ¹¹ However, as Erskine's letter and its list of recipients indicates, Erskine retained a sense of the avant-garde project that Ellison was attempting, and used his editorial influence to ensure that Invisible Man was reviewed in a way that would develop, rather than hinder, Ellison's ambitious project.

The period when Erskine worked with Ellison saw America's emergence as postwar hegemon and the reopening of the nation's painful “race question.” As a result, Erskine and Ellison's struggle to position the African American Ellison at the forefront of America's literary avant-garde took on not just literary but also political significance. Ellison's deliberate use of the form of American literary modernism asserts his right to “enter … into a particular community of discourse” and “appropriate” it to his social ends.Footnote ¹² Erskine's positioning of Ellison as an avant-garde novelist of national import therefore becomes a critical component of Ellison's project, and Ellison's editor becomes a critical ally in his “implicit attempt to enter into the language of modernism and open it onto the social field.”Footnote ¹³ Essentially, Erskine understood the importance artistically, socially, and politically of Ellison's work being properly recognized as avant-garde modernist literature and strove to position it as such.

It should also be pointed out that Erskine was not alone in this struggle. The milieu of literary production in the United States was shifting, slowly, and in the face of significant opposition, as other interracial literary partnerships began to appear.Footnote ¹⁴ Lawrence Jackson has written on the efforts of Bucklin Moon and Thomas Sancton to champion the voices of African American writers in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ¹⁵ Equally significant was the work of Hiram Haydn at Bobbs-Merrill and Random House, who, when “reprimanded” at Bobbs-Merrill for the fact that “his list for 1951 was unwisely filled with ‘Jews and Negroes’ [including Jay Saunders Redding,] stood up and delivered a ‘phillippic’ exhorting antiracist modern liberal ideals and the obvious necessity of books about racial and religious minorities.”Footnote ¹⁶ Jackson argues that “Redding was lucky that Haydn maintained his conviction; surely there were some editors unprepared to jeopardize their careers and fight so hard.”Footnote ¹⁷ As far as the archival record attests, there was less overtly racialized opposition to Ellison at the seemingly more liberal Random House than to Redding at Haydn's Bobbs-Merrill. Erskine, however, took on similar risks to bring Ellison to Random House, and to defend his work within it in the face of some similar institutional opposition to experimental work by an African American author.

To those less aware of this context, however, the white and southern Erskine appears a strange ally for the cosmopolitan and African American Ellison. Erskine was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1911 and would spend his formative years in the segregated South, taking his undergraduate degree from Rhodes College in 1932 apparently on the assumption that he would go into the cotton brokerage business.Footnote ¹⁸ It was while he was at Rhodes, however, that Erskine would absorb the “saturation in the New Criticism [that] made him an apt match for Ellison's projects.”Footnote ¹⁹ Of particular importance were Erskine's friendships with Robert Penn Warren, who would later secure him an editorial role on the Southern Review, and key New Critical figure Cleanth Brooks – both were crucial influences on the young Erskine. Erskine and Ellison's relationship to some extent embodies their common grounding in New Critical textual autonomy, and their faith in the ability of art to offer a “raft of hope” to bridge any racial or social divide between them and between Ellison and his audience, a faith that underpinned both Ellison's approach to his work and Erskine's approach to editing and marketing it.Footnote ²⁰

My other main points of departure here are existing considerations first of Ellison's politics, second of his practices, and finally of his influences. From those interested in Ellison's politics I take the assumption that Ellison viewed his own work as a radical move to claim the means and modes of modernist writing and put them to the social use of inviting greater interracial understanding.Footnote ²¹ From those examining Ellison's methods, I take an appreciation of the importance of considering Ellison's drafts, and the way that examining the different versions of a text can shape our understanding of its final form.Footnote ²² Finally, from those interested in Ellison's influences, I take an appreciation of the importance of parsing out Ellison's literary models. This appreciation takes on additional significance in my examination of Erskine's very careful and very deliberate positioning of Invisible Man as modernist and experimental, as this move by Erskine becomes a critical component of Ellison's very Burkean project.Footnote ²³ In this reading, Erskine's positioning – ordering – of Invisible Man demonstrates both his appreciation of what Ellison was attempting to do and his ability to contribute to it. Finally, and most importantly for my consideration here, there were few more immediate influences on the final form, popular understanding, and social and symbolic positioning of Ralph Ellison and his work than the editing of Albert Erskine.

Ralph Ellison's professional association with Albert Erskine began on 19 May 1944, when his then agent Henry Volkening wrote to advise him that the editor “Frank Taylor [of Reynal and Hitchcock] phoned me this morning making the following offer for your novel: $100 per month advance up to twelve months, that is, a total commitment of $1,200.”Footnote ²⁴ Volkening, having had Ellison “called to [his] attention” by Bucklin Moon, had been working as Ellison's literary agent since November of 1943, working to sell, amongst other writings, his story “In a Strange Country” to Tomorrow magazine.Footnote ²⁵ Ellison considered several other offers for his manuscript before accepting Taylor's proposal – an offer that even Richard Wright considered “a very good first contract.”Footnote ²⁶

Despite Ellison's new status as professional novelist and new funding, however, progress on Invisible Man was slow through 1945 and 1946. As Arnold Rampersad explains, this was not for want of effort on Ellison's part: “Ralph continued to work hard on his novel. [However, o]rchestrating the developing lines of plot and subplot was more difficult than he had imagined.”Footnote ²⁷ Ellison's editors and publishers were patient, however, content that he was at work on the novel, while also building his reputation publishing critical work at the Antioch Review.Footnote ²⁸

Upheaval was on the horizon, however. The firm of Reynal and Hitchcock was in trouble following the death of its founder, Curtice Hitchcock, in 1946. As Rampersad records, “Curtice Hitchcock's widow, Margaret Unwin Hitchcock, had taken over as leader after Hitchcock's death … but the transition was not going well.”Footnote ²⁹ This unrest led to the departure of a number of the firm's editorial staff, amongst them Albert Erskine and Frank Taylor. The pair wrote to Ellison on 4 March 1947 to “announce formally that we are resigning from the Board and staff of Reynal and Hitchcock as of Friday, March the seventh.”Footnote ³⁰ Following the pair's departure, the firm was in serious disarray, having lost much of its senior editorial staff. As a result of this confusion Ellison “escaped editorial supervision,” leaving him without a clear ally or point of contact at the firm.Footnote ³¹ Worse than this unmooring, however, was the fact that Ellison “considered Erskine and Taylor valuable enough to his project to [want to] follow their move,” leaving him feeling trapped at Reynal and Hitchcock, without the literary allies he needed to continue work on his novel.Footnote ³²

However, hope was on the horizon for Ellison and Invisible Man. Even in their letter of March 1947, Erskine and Taylor hinted at “exciting new plans” of which they would keep their authors abreast.Footnote ³³ Those exciting plans were that the pair had arranged a soft landing at Random House with cofounder Bennett Cerf. Once he discovered Erskine and Taylor's plans, Ellison was keen to follow. Random House were receptive to Ellison's “politicking” to effect a move to follow his editors – his loyalty lying with them as individuals rather than to his publishers as a company or institution.Footnote ³⁴ This began in June 1947 when Ellison visited Random House's impressive offices at 457 Madison Avenue and found that he “liked the atmosphere at [Random House], which had braved litigation to bring out James Joyce's Ulysses, as well as the fact that they were impressed enough with his work to offer to buy out his old contract and pay him an additional $500 advance.”Footnote ³⁵ The interlinking of financial and institutional fit is revealing of Ellison's approach to and appreciation of his editorial relationships. It was just as important to him that Random House was the place that had “braved litigation” to publish avant-garde literature as it was that they were prepared to pay him well for his work – and to help extricate him from the wreckage of Reynal and Hitchcock.Footnote ³⁶ Most significantly, at Erskine's Random House Ellison found both a publisher that would support his work financially and an editor who could give that work the right kind of positioning and artistic support.

Before going to Reynal to discuss Ellison's contract, however, the management at Random House required “a lengthy outline of his project” and his plans for completing Invisible Man.Footnote ³⁷ Ellison responded by creating in “outline the movement of each chapter using the Burkeian schemata, then … writ[ing] a textured summary.”Footnote ³⁸ This exercise proved productive for Ellison and for the conception of Invisible Man, and in order to construct it, he leaned on the expertise and advice of, amongst other allies, both Albert Erskine and Stanley Hyman. The result was that by the end of the process Ellison had “hammered out a coherent statement about the novel he was now calling ‘The Invisible Man’.”Footnote ³⁹

Despite all his efforts, and his carefully considered preference – material, psychological, and artistic – for Random House and Albert Erskine over Reynal and Hitchcock and editorial abeyance, Ellison remained fearful. As he wrote to Stanley Hyman on 17 June 1947, he was still anxious “that there is quite a lot of bitterness between Reynal & Hitchcock and the Taylor–Erskine combine and that they might hold on to the book out of spite.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In the end, however, he need not have worried. A little more than a month later, on 18 July 1947, Ellison, Bennett Cerf, and Frank Taylor signed a contract for The Invisible Man, in which Ellison agreed to a new deadline of 31 April 1948 in return for a $2,000 advance ($1,750 of which was given up front) and a 10 percent royalty rate (rising to 15 percent and then 20 percent, depending on sales).Footnote ⁴¹ Ellison's relief is palpable in his letters. As he wrote to Francis Steegmuller that August,

Proving once again the importance of a well-connected editor and a sympathetic publisher, Ellison had, with the help of Erskine and Random House, escaped from Reynal and Hitchcock to a place where he would be much better rewarded, supported, and appreciated while he finished work on Invisible Man.

The centrality of the authorial–editorial relationship to Ellison's practice of authorship is what emerges most strongly here. Ellison's loyalty did not lie with his publishers; rather the central point and most stable and significant relationship of Ellison's professional life was with his editors. The reason for Ellison's concern over the loss of his editors is also telling. Erskine appears as a critical component of the process and practice of Ellison's writing, and a relationship with an editor willing and able to aid him in achieving his goals, especially on a project as complex and ambitious as Invisible Man, was well worth enduring both worry and hardship to maintain.

The significance of having an established editor as a supporter, one who could be counted on as a sympathetic defender as well as an incisive critic, is further brought home by a note amongst Erskine's papers from the summer of 1947 during the negotiations to bring Ellison to Random House. Written by Robert Linscott, the editor of Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, the note laments, “If Ellison could organize as well as he can write; if he could think as keenly as he can feel, this violent attack on uncletomism could be a really good novel.”Footnote ⁴³ The note continues, “In scenes of violence Ellison is superb, but on the other hand there are some scenes that badly drag.”Footnote ⁴⁴ However, Linscott concludes his note by writing, “Because the novel at its best packs a terrific punch I'd be reluctant to pass it up without seeing more of what we have. In other words let's find out first of all how Ellison plans to finish it and just how amenable he is to suggestions for revision.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In his note, Linscott is an unsurprisingly sophisticated reader, and one sympathetic to Ellison's aims in his first draft of Invisible Man, but also one who seems opposed to fighting for the novel, at least in its current form. Erskine's role becomes clear here through an anonymous note accompanying Linscott's assessment. Addressed directly to Erskine, the note says that its author was “in accord with RNL's report attached. What's your comment on the last para,” asking about Ellison's plans.Footnote ⁴⁶

Erskine's comments on that final paragraph do not survive. It may well have been this opposition from his senior colleagues that prompted Erskine's request for the “lengthy outline” I mention above. Two things do become clear, however. First, there was opposition to Ellison's arrival at Random House. The source of this opposition seems to have been doubts over Ellison's ability – or even motivation – to finish Invisible Man. Second, these doubts were raised with Erskine directly. The conclusion that I draw from these two points is that Erskine's project to bring Ellison to Random House was one that he had to negotiate for in the face of some opposition from his colleagues, and for which he had to take personal responsibility. Erskine's success in bringing Ellison and his unpublished and unfinished three-year-old manuscript to Random House reveals his ability to champion not only his authors’ work, but his authors themselves within the complex structure of Random House, even in the face of some initial opposition. It is also further evidence for the value of having onside an editor of Erskine's influence and energy, as it is unlikely that Ellison's politicking would have been quite so successful in its absence. A well-connected editor thus becomes critical not only for shaping a writer's work, but also for positioning it at and within the right publishers. This is something that takes on particular significance given the project on which Ellison and Erskine were engaged. Not every publishing house would have taken on a debut African American novelist aiming at high modernism, and not every white editor would have been prepared or able to assist him in that endeavour. The confluence of a publisher prepared, or prepared to be convinced, to take on avant-garde fiction by a minority author with an editor whose personal background and literary training made him a sympathetic ally, willing to fight for both the work and the author, made Erskine's Random House one of the very few places where Ellison's work on Invisible Man could come to fruition.

With both Ellison and Erskine safely positioned at Random House by July 1947, the editing of Invisible Man could begin in earnest. Progress, however, was slow. Ellison remained hard at work in 1948, but with little to show for his efforts beyond the appearance of a version of “Battle Royal” in Negro Digest.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, by February 1949, Ellison was able to present Erskine with a “manuscript-in-progress.”Footnote ⁴⁸ It was with the “artistic devotion” that Ellison demonstrated in this manuscript that Erskine “consoled the higher-ups at Random House” who were otherwise becoming concerned with Ellison's lack of progress.Footnote ⁴⁹ Erskine was impressed by Ellison's work but, mindful of the deadlines of the publisher, “encouraged him to push for a fall 1949 publication.”Footnote ⁵⁰ For Ellison's part, “he thought well of Erskine's easy mannerisms” and, tellingly, “in particular his confidence in [Ellison's] ability to write.”Footnote ⁵¹ The relationship between Erskine and Ellison was thus established on a ground of mutual respect for each other's abilities, with Erskine prepared to mediate between his authors and his managers, and to press their case and the case for their work, even as he laboured to get Ellison writing to a deadline.

Faced in early 1949 with a complex manuscript of well over six hundred pages, Erskine began by making notes of chapters and their contents in small notebooks which were crammed with his neat handwriting. This was not a simple task. In fact, the complexity and ambition of Ellison's project is revealed in these dense notes. Even the published version of Invisible Man is hard to summarize meaningfully: it begins with its nameless protagonist already installed in his subterranean hiding place, living “rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites” and stealing electricity from “Monopolated Light & Power” for his “exactly 1,369 lights.”Footnote ⁵² From this “hole” he meditates on his invisibility, relates the cynical wisdom of his grandfather and the traumas of the blindfolded boxing match and electrified rug of the Battle Royale sequence.Footnote ⁵³ Invisible's tale then moves to his idealistic time in Ellison's parodic version of the Tuskegee Institute. Invisible is exiled from this institution by its Principal Bledsoe following a fateful drive which brings its rich benefactor Mr Horton into contact with the sharecropper Jim Trueblood, an encounter which shatters the carefully constructed image of blackness that Bledsoe had projected onto Horton and the other white trustees. Invisible's exile takes him to New York, where he is given the runaround through the offices of various trustees by supposed letters of recommendation provided by Bledsoe. Ultimately finding a job in a paint factory, Invisible is hospitalized and experimented upon following an explosion. After his release from hospital, Invisible is then recruited by Ellison's pseudo-communistic Brotherhood after a spontaneous and rousing speech at the scene of an eviction. Through the Brotherhood, Invisible meets Mary Rambo, whose guesthouse he lives in, and from where he travels to make speeches to the people of Harlem, and later the women of “downtown,” before several incidents – including accusations of improper behaviour and an encounter with the black nationalist Ras the Exhorter (or Destroyer) – see Invisible retreat from the Brotherhood.Footnote ⁵⁴ First and briefly he adopts the identity of local pimp Reinhardt and then, following a riot and second battle with Ras, underground to the hole that brings the story full circle.

Erskine's notebooks show that the manuscript Ellison presented to his editor in 1949 did closely resemble the published text. Significant deviations do exist in the manuscript version, most notably the existence of Leroy, a drowned former resident of Mary's guesthouse whose journal becomes one of Invisible's prized possessions, and the character of Cleo, Invisible's love interest, both of whom were cut entirely from the published version of Invisible Man.

At this stage, most of Erskine's notes are simply the topics of chapters and their locations, such as “Pp. 1–19 Prologue (I)” and “Pp. 20–40 Battle Royal (II).”Footnote ⁵⁵ Even at this stage, however, Erskine made editorial recommendations, mostly to do with the structure of the novel. Many of these early and detailed suggestions, such as the idea that “Ch V + end of Trueblood episode (pp. 76–78) [should] be added to Ch IV [“Drive with Mr Horton”] so that V w[ould] begin on 78, Golden Day 78–113,” were taken up by Ellison in later drafts, clearly showing the effect of Erskine's editorial ideas and comments on the shape of Ellison's text.Footnote ⁵⁶

This editorial method – Erskine making notes and suggestions as Ellison continued to work on his manuscript, conducted mostly at range and mostly through letters and telephone calls despite the two men's proximity in New York – continued for much of 1950 until 1 August, when, as Fanny Ellison wrote to Bea Steegmuller, Ellison sent an (almost) full manuscript off to Erskine: “Albert now has Ralph's book – except for the final chapter – and all week Ralph has been walking the floor. He's in an absolute state of suspension and I do hope that Albert completes the reading soon before both Ralph and I have breakdowns.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Ellison need not have worried, however. A few weeks later “Erskine relieved the main tension in Ralph's life by stamping his imprimatur on ‘The Invisible Man’ … All his critical objections were minor.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The result of this broad editorial approval was that Ellison “moved to close out the project,” taking a month in a “hot, cramped basement room” to address Erskine's queries.Footnote ⁵⁹ Emerging “four furious weeks later, [Ellison] was sure he was done,” finally, with Invisible Man.Footnote ⁶⁰

However, he was not done. And the final stages of the shaping of Invisible Man add another layer to our understanding of Erskine's editorial practice as well as, perhaps, of his appreciation of the challenges facing Ellison in his attempts to finish his manuscript. As Jackson has it, “Around June [1951], Ellison went for an appointment with his editor,” after which “Ellison and … Erskine … devised a schedule to read the manuscript aloud, editing and revising as they went along,” at Erskine's family home in Westport, an hour or so's drive from New York City.Footnote ⁶¹ As Jackson states, this was typical of Erskine, who “often invited writers to his house for extended stays while they prepared their manuscripts for publication.”Footnote ⁶² At home in Westport, Erskine offered his authors comfortable accommodation, excellent home cooking, and time to work intensively on their manuscripts away from the distractions of the city. Up to this point in his career, Ellison had been mostly writing in a cramped, hot apartment at 749 St. Nicholas Avenue and supplementing his income working as the building's supervisor, with only occasional summer trips to Long Island and the aforementioned stint in a basement room for a change in working environment. By contrast, Erskine was working in the comfortable editorial offices of the famous Random House building on Madison Avenue that gave the publishers their colophon and at home in Westport. Erskine's plan therefore offered a chance for Ellison to work not only without distractions, but also in comfort in a New England space otherwise inaccessible to him as an African American New Yorker.

At Erskine's home in Westport, the two men read and reread the text of Invisible Man, making alterations as they sounded out its scenes and dialogue. Ellison found this process invaluable – so much so that he “read future manuscripts aloud into a tape recorder, to hear the rhythm of the sound,” providing further evidence not only of the effectiveness of Erskine and Ellison's work in Westport, but also of the lasting effect of Erskine's editorial methods on Ellison's practice of authorship.Footnote ⁶³

This stage of the process was intensive. As Ellison wrote to Albert Murray from Westport in June 1951, “Erskine and I are reading it aloud, not cutting (I cut out 200 pages myself and got it down to 606) but editing.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This distinction is significant. Ellison plainly saw editing, rather than wholesale cutting, as a critical part of the writing process, and also saw himself as a central participant – alongside Erskine – in that process. Erskine's notes from this time throw new light on precisely what happened in these Westport editing sessions, what cuts were made, and reveal precisely the influence of these sessions on the final form of Invisible Man. Erskine's notes are extensive, and move from small notebooks onto larger sheets of notepaper. Here Erskine makes notes and suggestions; for example, on the Trueblood section he queries,

In this example we can clearly see the effects of Erskine's editing on Ellison's text, as it is this “curiosity” – rather than a foreknowledge of Trueblood and his crimes – that drives Norton to his fatal encounter with the incestuous sharecropper.Footnote ⁶⁶

Other notes are only partially taken up by Ellison. Such notes include Erskine's objection that the “Introduction to the Chapel sequence” – that is to say, the first section of chapter 5 in the published text – “moves forward in time to a place where the hero's awareness is a different order from what it was on the campus, to the time, that is, of the prologue.”Footnote ⁶⁷ It is possible to see Erskine's point here. Invisible's understanding of the chapel service as the “black rite of Horatio Alger … millionaires come down to portray themselves; not merely acting out the myth of their goodness, and wealth and success and power and benevolence and authority in cardboard masks, but themselves, these virtues concretely,” does seem more the level of insight displayed by the cynical narrator of the prologue rather than of the hopeful student of the first part of Invisible Man.Footnote ⁶⁸ That Erskine's suggestion to “[c]onsider possibly putting this section into italics” was at least mostly rejected by Ellison thus becomes all the more telling, and if anything a reminder that the Invisible of the prologue is the narrator of the rest of the text, something that perhaps even Erskine needed reminding of here. That Ellison did put the most cynical parts of this section into italics – that section beginning “Ha!” to so many of student-Invisible's old presumptions – does suggest that at least some of this section does belong entirely to the Invisible of the prologue. Through this note it becomes clear that a compromise was arrived at here to show the difference between the diegetic and narratorial Invisibles, again showing the clear effect of Erskine's editing on Ellison's text.Footnote ⁶⁹

The prologue itself was a matter of some concern to Erskine, as he took issue with the “editorial” tone of the section, questioning, “shouldn't the purpose of this section be to set up the idea of the invisible hero symbolically (as opposed to philosophically and also logically)[?]”Footnote ⁷⁰ In other words, Erskine's concerns here are structural, worrying that the prologue “gives away too much.”Footnote ⁷¹ To avoid this, he advises Ellison that the best way forward would be “keeping the symbolic elements and throwing away (or saving for later) the reflections on them,” as the section would then “set up the themes of the book in the same tone of voice as the book itself employs,” rather than adopting a more retrospective and philosophical tone.Footnote ⁷² Erskine's worries here are not those of propriety, nor of ambition, but of consistency, tone, and clarity. That he and Ellison were able to talk through these issues and that the prologue emerged more or less unscathed from them is further revealing of Erskine's willingness to accept his authors’ ideas, even over his own reservations.

Erskine's meticulous, understanding, and collaborative approach to editing Ellison's novel is certainly in keeping with Joseph Blotner's portrait of an editor “meticulous about clarity and sensitive to nuance.”Footnote ⁷³ However, this cooperative style takes on additional significance in the context of Ellison's other encounters with white editorial authority, in particular his experiences with Thomas Sancton of Survey Graphic. Lawrence Jackson relates this “bitter saga” in more detail, but the essence of the incident was that Ellison, commissioned by Sancton to write first for a special issue of Survey and then possibly for the New Republic, found himself seemingly on the verge of “the kind of exposure for a black writer that was unheard of in midcentury America.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The situation dramatically changed, however, when Sancton, disappointed with the work Ellison submitted, “attempted an Olympian rewrite of almost the entire essay,” a “crushing blow to the relationship between Ellison and the literary Left – and really, the break between Ellison's definition of himself as a critic and as a writer of prose fiction.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Sancton's actions robbed Ellison of his authority, directly questioned his abilities as a writer, and threatened to seriously damage his reputation in both literary and social circles. That Ellison was as a result protective of his authorial position would be understandable, especially as the essay, which would go on to be reworked as “Twentieth-Century Literature and the Black Mask of Humanity,” was explicitly about the kind of segregation “of the word” that Ellison seemed to experience at Sancton's hands.Footnote ⁷⁶ Erskine's methods, willingness to concede to Ellison's ideas, and position as a genuine literary ally engaged in the same experimental project as Ellison himself must therefore be understood here as a significant moment of interracial literary collaboration, and one that goes some way to explaining Ellison's closeness to his editor.

Erskine's notes outline the draft text of Invisible Man, and his comments on it, chapter by chapter. Erskine's other suggestions include that the Liberty Paints chapter might benefit if “everything but Brockway is cut to a minimum – esp Hambro, the Union meeting,” “cutting the roaches” from the section in chapter 15 dealing with the broken coin bank, and questions of “what does he think” when Invisible first encounters Brotherhood literature in his new apartment at Mary Rambo's.Footnote ⁷⁷ Once again, Ellison seems to take more of Erskine suggestions than he rejects, because although the union meeting at Liberty Paints survives – as it should – the roaches have gone, and the text simply moves on from Invisible's first encounter with Brotherhood literature in the bath at Mary's, circumventing Erskine's criticism of Invisible's lack of immediate response. Erskine also recommends that Ras should “wrong the hero a little” in their street encounter, possibly leading to the pitched battle that Ellison depicts in chapter 17.Footnote ⁷⁸ Alongside this is a complaint that “Ras’ language should be cleaned up some,” which may well have been the origin of Ellison's “plan whereby I trade four-letter words for scenes” which he reported to Albert Murray in 1951.Footnote ⁷⁹ Places where Erskine remained dubious, however, include the “Rinehart business,” of which the editor was “[h]ighly doubtful,” though apparently willing to accept, once its value became clear.Footnote ⁸⁰

By this point, and in response to suggestions by Erskine and other readers, the major cuts, including the most significant – the loss of Leroy's journal – had already occurred. Leroy (or sometimes LeRoy) had appeared in earlier drafts as a tragically drowned former resident of Mary Rambo's guesthouse whose communist books and writings had formed a major turning point in Invisible's political development. Indeed, his journal, discovered in the room Invisible inherits from him at Mary's, became in these early drafts one of Invisible's most precious possessions, carried with him for the rest of the novel in his increasingly battered briefcase. As I mention above, references to Leroy appear in Erskine's early outline notes from 1949, but not in those that come from the draft Ellison brought to Westport in 1951, meaning that Leroy and his journal were cut sometime between those two dates. Adam Bradley discusses the significance of this cut and its origin in detail in his book on Ellison's process.Footnote ⁸¹ Leroy in these early drafts is “[l]ess a character than a conceit,” and his journal a distorted, “fun-house version of Invisible Man's deepest pondering from the prologue and epilogue,” too compressed to be as compelling as it would be spread over the course of the novel.Footnote ⁸² The first suggestion for cutting this lengthy section came from “Harry Ford, an editor at Knopf.”Footnote ⁸³ In 1950, Ford read a draft of Invisible Man, and recommended cutting the journal, as it was “[p]rolix, didactic and inimical to the narrative – a crutch for the narrator which never entirely works … and which remains simply a device.”Footnote ⁸⁴ An identical letter exists in Erskine's archive, suggesting that Erskine was at the very least keeping abreast of these reader responses to Ellison's work, if not acting as a go-between, using his connections in the world of literary editing to solicit these responses on behalf of his author.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ford suggests going further than Ellison did, arguing that “if Leroy goes, then it seems to me that Mary has no reason for being, and all passages relevant should be deleted,” a process that he argues would be “an invaluable tightening of the narrative.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Erskine's role in soliciting or dealing with these reader reports is further confirmed by Ellison's report to Albert Murray in 1951 that “while most of the reader reactions were enthusiastic, there were some stupid ones,” and that he and Erskine were working in response to these reports, positive and negative.

Despite their intensity, Erskine and Ellison were able to enjoy these final read-aloud sessions. Indeed, in his letters from this time, Ellison sounds delighted with the process, writing to Albert Murray that, despite his fears of editorial squeamishness, “the rough stuff: the writing on the belly, Rinehart (Rine-the-runner, Rine-the rounder, Rine-the-gambler, Rine-the-lover, Rine-the-reverend, old rine and heart), yes, and Ras the exhorter who becomes Ras the destroyer … it's all here.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Some significant cuts were made, however. In particular, and in line with the shift in emphasis begun with the removal of Leroy's journal, “They knocked off Ellison's slighter effects: all of his throwaway symbols to the radical movement were stricken from the text.”Footnote ⁸⁸ For example, “The Invisible Man no longer cried ‘She's ofay! She's ofay!’ when encountering a white woman, and Brother Jack no longer sipped ‘Cuba Libre’ beer at a Harlem bar.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Instead, the focus shifts to Invisible himself, and his individual psychological development. Taken together, these changes align with Erskine and Ellison's ambitions for the text as a “raft of hope,” the text's depoliticization deemphasizing the radical aspects of it, in favour of foregrounding its more internal, universal, and modernist ambitions.

The final significant change in these Westport sessions was Ellison's decision “to remove entirely the hero's paramour Louise, the ‘woman of woman’, as a character.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The importance of this cut has been explored by Bradley and others.Footnote ⁹¹ It was a substantial cut that, alongside the removal of Cleo, took out the only references to Invisible's genuine romantic life.Footnote ⁹² The fact that, so late in the process, and under Erskine's direct supervision, cuts of such significance were still happening is revealing of the direct impact that the editor had on the form of Ellison's work. Even at this late stage, Ellison took advice from his editor, and made alterations based on a collaborative working method in which the two men read the text together, making and suggesting cuts based on this shared reading experience.

Following this enjoyable but intensive time in Westport, Ellison was able to leave at Erskine's home a manuscript that was, to both of their satisfactions, complete. Even the matter of the title, Invisible Man rather than The Invisible Man, had, finally, been settled. Other editorial duties lay in the future for Erskine, however, having to do with the positioning of both his author and his text.

The first, and perhaps most surprising, of these duties was to do with Ellison's agent. By 1952, Ellison had been represented by Russell and Volkening for almost a decade, and they had played a central role in putting Ellison in touch with Frank Taylor in 1944. However, as Ellison reported in a letter to Ellen Wright in March 1952, he had failed “to hear from [his] agent for about three years,” as, in Ellison's opinion, Henry Volkening had come to the conclusion that “I'd never finish my book,” and so given up promoting his seemingly unpromising client.Footnote ⁹³ Feeling abandoned, Ellison wanted to be released from his contract with Volkening before the publication of Invisible Man. The parting was, in the end, “pleasant.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The end came when “Volkening, unwilling to mud-wrestle over what might prove to be a pittance, settled with Random House” to pass Ellison's representation directly over to the publisher, despite knowing that “he could have prevailed over Ralph in almost any court of law.”Footnote ⁹⁵ With Random assuming this double duty, it becomes apparent that Ellison was happy for his publisher both to position, as well as to shape, his work.

Rampersad may well be right that Volkening was willing to let a writer who, in the winter of 1951 at least, must have appeared to be an unpromising client indeed go for free rather than expend economic and social capital taking legal action against a debut novelist to extract their percentage. However, it is striking that Volkening came to this conclusion only “[a]fter a pleasant lunch with Albert Erskine,” following which “he let Ralph know that ‘we hereby relinquish all rights and interests’” in Invisible Man, meaning that Erskine must have played a key role in convincing the agent of the folly of continuing the legal mud-wrestling.Footnote ⁹⁶

The second duty that Erskine performed for his author was welcoming the Ellisons into a New York social world that was often unfriendly to non-Anglo-Saxon non-Protestants and securing the advantages that this access gave Ellison in his work and career. Erskine's access was critical to Ellison's way of life and his social standing in New York, and this positioning was a key example of Erskine's value to Ellison as a social ally.Footnote ⁹⁷ What the incident with Volkening shows, however, is another example of the ability of Erskine, as a well-positioned, powerful literary editor working at an international publisher with a number of Volkening's other clients, to use his social power to help manoeuvre Ellison through the potentially choppy waters of a New York publishing scene that was still very much based on personal relationships, gentlemen's agreements, and the kind of lunch meetings that Ellison alone would have struggled to negotiate quite so smoothly and successfully as his more established white editor.

It is the positioning of Ellison's work that reveals another of the key editorial roles played by Erskine. Lawrence Jackson sees this positioning as both significant and simple: “On its book flaps and in its press releases, Random House perfected fully the mystique of a novel written by a black by helping to create an author who was an authentic Negro – a former shoeshine boy and jazz musician, both proletariat and hipster.”Footnote ⁹⁸ There is certainly something of this in Random House's early positioning of Ellison and his first novel. However, Jackson does note the complexities at work in selling a text as complex as Invisible Man as simply a “race book” and an author as ambitious as Ellison as purely a “race man.” Jackson comments that even in Random House's early publicity there was a recognition that “[t]he somber intellectual trials and costly political engagements of a highly experimental modernist writer ran counter to the creation of an authentically black yet competent artist,” which made Random's positioning of Ellison as “an authentic Negro” all the more complicated and, in many ways, questionable.Footnote ⁹⁹

The first example of his editors’ more sophisticated and sympathetic positioning of Ellison's work came in 1947 with the appearance of the “Battle Royal” sequence from chapter 1 of Invisible Man in Horizon magazine. The section had been submitted by Frank Taylor and Albert Erskine under the title “The Invisible Man,” and Taylor wrote excitedly to Ellison in 1947 of its reception, telling Ellison,

Erskine and Taylor's choice of publication was significant. Edited by the formidable Cyril Connolly, Horizon was a magazine for emerging literature of some note, and the appearance of Ellison's “The Invisible Man” alongside work by Jacques Barzun, Christopher Isherwood, and Wallace Stevens was a clear effort by his editors to position Ellison's work as not only significant, but also experimental, worthy of appearing alongside these literary figures of international standing.

Much the same can be said of the critical mailout to Erskine's “intelligent reviewers” in 1952. Erskine's letter was carefully constructed. First, it directs the attention of its readers toward an understanding of Ellison's novel as a significant – indeed unignorable – debut that should appeal to the literary avant-garde. Second, it studiously avoids positioning Ellison's novel as in any way a “race book,” making no reference to Ellison's race or that of his nameless protagonist. This tactic was significant. Ellison would write in the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Invisible Man of his hope that “a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ For Ellison, the novel becomes, like the raft in Huckleberry Finn, a place where the normal rules and mores of society can be put to one side, and a space where new empathies can be found as a result. For Erskine to sell Invisible Man in a way that pitched it to his “intelligent reviewers” as a work significant for its literary experimentation therefore shows not just a savvy understanding of market forces, but also a sensitive grasp of his author's goals and ambitions.

Just as significant as the wording of Erskine's letter, however, is the list of people to whom he sent it. As I outline above, Erskine's list of “intelligent reviewers” is impressive and draws on his extensive network of social and professional contacts. Several of Erskine's reviewers did require additional prompting from the editor, with both Williams and Hughes initially hesitating on the ground of their writing schedules. However, with some patience and persistence, Erskine secured positive notices from all his readers, including Hughes, who thought it “a stunning block-buster of a book”; Carl van Vechten, who called the book “a sensationally ironic report of a Negro's life in America”; William Carlos Williams, who thought both it “terrifyingly true” and “the concept of an invisible man, the negro … brilliant.”Footnote ¹⁰² Stanley Hyman, altogether more familiar with the text, thought the final version “very pretty”; and Saul Bellow thought it “a superb book.”Footnote ¹⁰³

The reviews that resulted from these early contacts were also collected and collated by Erskine and his fellows at Random House. These included copies of Saul Bellow's famous review in Commentary, and a quote from Hughes's review in the Chicago Defender that described Invisible Man as “a new novel by the young Negro writer Ralph Ellison that will make you shake in your boots and see the race problem anew from twelve different angles … it's bound to be talked about.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Getting good notices from these carefully selected reviewers allowed Erskine to draw on their stores of symbolic capital, and in doing so to position Ellison's work as a book as important for its literary ambition as it was for its social commentary. Writing of the critical consensus of the day, Mark Greif argues that, despite dissenting voices on the left, Ellison's reviewers concluded that he “had written a new Great American Novel” and even gone some way to answering the universal “question of man,” even if “they couldn't all quite say yet, exactly, how.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Greif directs particular attention to Delmore Schwartz's Partizan Review piece, which concluded that Invisible Man “is not merely a story about being a Negro, and not a protest novel, unless we are willing to call it everybody's protest novel, to use James Baldwin's phrase,” a point that Greif places alongside Saul Bellow's claim in Commentary that “Mr Ellison has not adopted a minority tone” to demonstrate the degree to which Ellison's novel was received as an avant-garde and literary, rather than minority, work.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Much of this response is due to the power and effectiveness of Ellison's novel, of course, but the nudge that Erskine gave his early and influential reviewers in his mailout clearly played a significant part in shaping the critical consensus around the novel, as many of the same people, phrases, and ideas from these early reviews populate much of the critical response that Greif examines.

By 1954 Invisible Man was safely published and advertised, and carefully positioned in the market. Erskine's work with Ellison, however, and the roles he played in Ellison's career continued to develop. Erskine stood as a referee and helped refine Ellison's applications for a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, where Ralph and Fanny would spend 1955. The Ellisons’ year abroad, however, was not without incident, and two in particular are revealing of Erskine's ongoing role in Ellison's career.

The first came to light when, in November 1955, Ellison wrote to Erskine expressing concern and consternation that Invisible Man was out of stock in several places in the United States, and that the book was apparently being remaindered by Random House. Ellison was understandably furious in this letter, writing that Random House was exhibiting “a singular lack of respect for our relationship” by neglecting to inform him of any steps to remainder his novel, and imploring that “someone, Don Klopfer or Robert Haas … write me exactly what is going on.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ On 6 December Erskine replied to Ellison's letter with one of his own. Erskine is polite and politic in his letter, saying first that he can “understand your disappointment in hearing that the book was out of stock and to some extent your irritation” at having been kept out of the loop.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As the letter continues, however, the importance of Erskine and his work at Random House becomes clear. He goes on to tell Ellison that had his initial letter “come about two weeks later I would have able to report that we were going back to the press and that copies would be shipped when ready.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As Erskine wrote to Ellison, at the time he was replying, “We are going back to the press,” although he is also keen to impress upon Ellison that “the reason for it (since you say ‘business is as business does’) is not a matter of business but rather a matter of admitting and rectifying a mistake,” reassuring his author that this was not a token effort on the part of a publisher to placate an author, but rather the rectifying of a simple accounting error.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Upon discovering an error to do with the counting of books shipped against books sold, Erskine had not only rectified this mistake, but also worked to prevent the same situation from happening again. As he wrote to Ellison, the editor had successfully “campaigned” not only to get Invisible Man back into print, but also to ensure that “it is now established here that no remaindering of books will go forward without consultation with the editorial department,” meaning that similar issues would not arise without Erskine himself being consulted.Footnote ¹¹¹

In this episode, Erskine shows not only the immediate value of having an editor willing and able to go to bat within his publisher for an author's work – he got Invisible Man back into print – but also his wide-ranging conception of the role of the editor, as he secured additional powers for editors at Random House over the remaindering process, essentially giving editors further control over not only getting, but also keeping, their authors in print.

Ellison was completely satisfied by Erskine's response. He began his reply, dated 14 December 1955, by saying, “Thanks for clearing the air. I feel much better about things.”Footnote ¹¹² Further making the point that his gripe was personal (and personally felt) rather than professional or even economical, Ellison went on to tell Erskine that a great part of his irritation came from the fact that this accidental remaindering seemed to reveal that “[f]or what others may regard quite justifiably as an exhausted commodity has become for me the main source of my public identity” as a writer of fiction.Footnote ¹¹³ Erskine's approach to this issue – careful, measured, and personally reassuring – shows his understanding of the complexities of this relationship and appreciation of the fact that, as his publisher, Random House exerted significant control over Ellison's public identity, a trust that Erskine was keen not to abuse.

Of more practical concern to the Ellisons in Rome, however, was the matter of income tax. In March 1956, Ellison wrote to Erskine about his concern “to see the general advance I received in September listed on my earnings statement as royalties received” in 1955, despite the fact that he has not cashed the cheque until the 1956 tax year.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Ellison's “concern” at this event stemmed from the fact that the precise date of the cheque was “going to make a big difference in the tax we'll pay” in 1955.Footnote ¹¹⁵ There would also have been a racial consideration at play here. As Ellison would have been well aware, other successful African American writers, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, found themselves hounded by the IRS at various points during the height of their successes.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As a result it would have been hard for Ellison not to have felt victimized or at least unsupported by his predominantly white publisher.

Erskine, initially at a loss to help his author, nevertheless did offer some advice, telling Ellison that it would be possible in future to set up caps on how much he was paid per year, with any additional earned royalty or other income being kept by Random House to be portioned out as a salary, or against which Ellison would be able to take loans and “promissory notes” to avoid additional taxation.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Once again here we see Erskine as a figure able and willing to guide Ellison through the more esoteric aspects of the often idiosyncratic world of publishing, and to help Ellison not only with his work, but also with his finances.

Erskine would go on to work with Ellison on both Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory. In this role, Erskine worked to secure copyright for Ellison's scattered essays; to make revisions; and to order, section, and title the collections themselves.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As Ellison wrote to John Callahan, after completing the final revisions on “An Extravagance of Laughter,” “Erskine and I made corrections on the spot so that the ms. could be sent to the copy editor.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Well into Ellison's mid-career, Erskine was still working closely with him, using similar methods to those deployed during the writing of Invisible Man.

A criticism that could be levelled at Erskine at this point may be his failure to secure a second novel from Ellison, to obtain a follow-up to one of the most significant novels produced by Random House, and to prevent Ellison's slide into the “hectoring,” sometimes “obnoxious” figure of what Stanley Hyman called “a transitional generation” of African American men of letters.Footnote ¹²⁰ And perhaps Erskine could have done more to wring Ellison's second novel out of him. I argue, however, that Erskine's involvement with these later projects is not a symptom of some enabling of Ellison's literary torpor, but rather honest efforts to keep Ellison's stock, both literarily and socially, as high as possible. Very probably, Erskine was doing so in the hope of using this stock to launch Ellison's second novel as high as possible – he certainly, and repeatedly, asked for updates on its progress – but their ongoing working relationship did provide a way for Ellison to continue to get his work published, and for Erskine to continue to position his author as a significant writer, even into the “briar patch” of the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹²¹

Long after the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison retained a consciousness of how Erskine had helped him to move into the New York social elite. As he wrote of his friendship with Robert Penn Warren to Nathan A. Scott in 1989, “Thanks to Albert Erskine, Red's old friend and our mutual editor, I had known Warren before he and Eleanor were married (he was the most distinguished writer to attend the book party given for the publishing of I.M.).”Footnote ¹²² And there were many other lifelong contacts Ellison made through the Erskines. Events like the publishing party that the Erskines had hosted in 1952 for the launch of Invisible Man were about promoting the book and celebrating its success, but they were also about positioning Ellison himself within the elite of New York society. Without Erskine, Ellison would have struggled to make these kinds of connections and to accrue the kind of social capital that went with them.

The overlap between the social and professional spheres in Ellison's life is reflected microcosmically in the way that the relationship between Erskine and Ellison is also friendly and personal, as well as related to their work. The correspondence between them is peppered with Christmas cards, postcards from their travels, and thanks for evenings spent at each other's homes. Even at the times when their professional relationship was at its most strained, Ellison and Erskine remained friends, with Ellison concluding his furious letter about the remaindering of Invisible Man from 1955 with the sincerely expressed hope that “this find you, as Father Divine would say, serene in conscience, hearty in soul, and happy in every muscle, nerve, vein, fiber, and sinew of your bodily form.”Footnote ¹²³ Ellison's relationship with Erskine is central to his work, to his life, and to his ability to gain a foothold in the contentious and racially charged world of 1950s New York society. It was also central to the development of some of the working practices that would characterize the rest of his career. In particular, reading manuscripts aloud as a method of copy-editing and finally shaping his work would stay with Ellison for the rest of his career.

Tim Groenland argues that “an editorial relationship, if it spans a significant period of an author's career, is likely to be … ‘the author's primary relationship in his or her working life’.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Ellison's relationship with Erskine outlasted other entanglements with agents, literary allies, and publishers. In exploring the impact of this relationship, I have argued that the role of the editor is, first, to shape the work of the author under their charge. The work that Erskine and Ellison conducted in their Westport sessions, working to read and hone the final form of Invisible Man, is evidence enough of this. It is here that the final cuts – of scenes, of characters, and of events – took place. It is also where changes in style and structure occurred. All this happened through an immediate and collaborative relationship in which both men contributed to the work being done on the manuscript. The interplay was fascinating here. Erskine was clearly empowered to make suggestions to Ellison, and Ellison clearly valued his editor's opinion highly enough to listen to his suggestions. Yet there was no sense of Erskine overriding his author's judgement, nor of pulling rank at any point to insist on changes. Invisible Man remains always Ellison's book. And even beyond this, Erskine was a key contributor to the literary network that shaped Invisible Man even before it reached Westport. He appears through the archives as a key go-between, if not provider of the contacts with the other writers and informed readers to whom Ellison sent his manuscript.

Equally significant is Erskine's primary role in shaping the reception and understanding of Ellison's work. This work ranged from deploying significant “intelligent reviewers” to establish the credentials of Invisible Man as a novel of national significance through to Erskine's work ingratiating Ellison into the potentially unwelcoming world of the 1950s New York cultural elite. There is ample evidence from the archive of Erskine's tireless efforts to publicize Ellison's work in ways that not only maximized its sales potential, but also stayed true to Ellison's understanding of his literary “raft of hope” as a potential bridge across or way around societal and racial divides.

More practically, Erskine took up Ellison's cause when he needed to escape from unsatisfactory positions at both Reynal and Hitchcock – by making a case for the book at Random House against opposition from other editors – and Russell and Volkening – using his position to convince Henry Volkening to let Ellison go without too much unpleasantness.

Finally, Erskine's critical role in shaping Ellison's understanding of himself as an author emerges here. He shaped Ellison's practice of authorship, introduced techniques that Ellison valued across his career, and worked as Ellison's contact, both personal and professional, in a world that, as Ellison's career continued, became increasingly more about change than about stability. Erskine's literary editing was a role that was complex and involved a very deliberate game of manipulating social, economic, and symbolic capital, but it is also a role that established Albert Erskine as a primary figure in shaping the work, reception, and authorship of Ralph Ellison.