“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

— Ralph Ellison

"Richard Wright's Blues" (1945), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 129.

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Ralph Ellison 82

American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer 1914–1994

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