Arnold Rampersad
Oxford Companion to African American Literature:
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Arnold Rampersad
Rampersad, Arnold (b. 1941), scholar, literary and cultural critic, educator, winner of the American Book Award, and MacArthur Fellow. Born in 1941 in Trinidad, Arnold Rampersad received a BA and MA from Bowling Green State University and an MA and PhD from Harvard. He has held teaching positions at Stanford, Rutgers, and Columbia. Rampersad has been Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton since 1990.
Although he began his career specializing in Herman Melville, Rampersad is best known for biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. In The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976), Rampersad sought to trace the intellectual development of one of this century's preeminent black political and social leaders. He achieved this by presenting the complete scope of Du Bois's complex and paradoxical beliefs and opinions. By bringing the conservative Du Bois into relation with the radical Du Bois, Rampersad made sense of what might appear to be a contradictory career.
In the two-volume Life of Langston Hughes (1986–1988), Rampersad again illuminated the life of a central figure in African American literary and cultural studies. As was the case with Du Bois, Hughes presented an instance of a writer whose complexities had been insufficiently revealed. Well known was Hughes's affection for “common everyday” African Americans. Less well known were the psychological and cultural groundings of this affection, subjects Rampersad sought to illuminate. Revealed, too, was the historical background against which Hughes so frequently reacted, such that The Life of Langston Hughes is not only concerned with the life of one person but also with the life of a culture and a nation. It is considered the authoritative biography of this central African American poet.
Rampersad is rightly credited with rehabilitating biography as a valued form of literary and cultural criticism in the face of the influence of literary theory in the late 1980s and the 1990s. While literary biography is not intended to replace literary or cultural criticism, per se, or literary theory, Rampersad's contribution is to restore a neglected mode of intellectual and scholarly discourse to its previous prominence. In Days of Grace (1993), tennis star Arthur Ashe's autobiography, which Rampersad coauthored, and in the biography Jackie Robinson (1997), Rampersad brought the craft of the scholar to the enterprise of popular biography, illuminating the life of an instrumental figure in African American cultural life during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In dealing with all these subjects—Du Bois, Hughes, and Ashe—Rampersad sought to bring the individual life into relation with the life of the culture. The title of the second volume of The Life of Langston Hughes, I Dream a World powerfully indicates the extent to which Rampersad seeks to negotiate the connection between the visionary aspects of individual greatness and the demands of cultural representativeness by means of scholarly biography.
Bibliography
- Arnold Rampersad, Melville's Israel Potter: A Pilgrimage and Progress, 1969.
- Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1976.
- Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes,
2 vols ., 1986–1988. - Arthur Ashe and Arnold Rampersad, Days of Grace, 1993
Theodore O. Mason, Jr.
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
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Works by Arnold Rampersad
(b. 1941)
| 1986 | The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America. This biography by the distinguished professor and literary critic, covering Hughes's childhood through the Harlem Renaissance, wins virtually universal praise. Reviewer David Nicholson calls it "the best biography of a black writer we have had." The second volume, Dream a World, would appear in 1988. |
| 1988 | The Life of Langston Hughes: I Dream a World, 1941-1967. The second volume and conclusion of an authoritative biography of the great African American writer. Poet Rita Dove speaks for many reviewers when she calls Rampersad's book a "superlative study of... the most prominent Afro-American poet of our century." |
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Arnold Rampersad
Arnold Rampersad (born 13 November 1941) is an American biographer and literary critic born in Trinidad and Tobago. The first volume (1986) of his Life Of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.[1]
Rampersad is currently Professor of English and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. He was Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities from January 2004 to August 2006. As Senior Associate Dean, he was responsible for the full array of departments in the humanities, including Art & Art History, Asian Languages, Classics, Comparative Literature, Drama, French and Italian, German Studies, Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Slavic Languages and Literature, and Spanish and Portuguese.*
Professor Rampersad was a member of the Stanford English Department from 1974 to 1983, before accepting a position at Rutgers University. Since then he taught there and at Columbia and Princeton before returning to Stanford in 1998.
His teaching covers such areas as nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature; the literature of the American South; American and African-American autobiography; race and American literature; and the Harlem Renaissance. From 1991 to 1996, he held a MacArthur "genius grant" fellowship. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. In 2007, he published a biography of Ralph Ellison (1914–1994).
He is also the half-brother of Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100.
Books
- The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois (Harvard, 1976)
- The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford, 2 vols., 1986, 1988)
- Days of Grace: A Memoir (Knopf, 1993), co-authored with Arthur Ashe
- Jackie Robinson: A Biography (Knopf, 1997)
- Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Knopf, 2007)
In addition, he has edited several volumes including the following:
- Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,
- the Library of America edition (2 vols.) of works by Richard Wright, including revised individual editions of Native Son and Black Boy
- Slavery and the Literary Imagination (as co-author)
- Race and American Culture (co-editor with Shelley Fisher Fishkin) - of the book series published by Oxford University Press
- Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes (co-editor with David Roessel) (Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. 2006)
References
- ^ "National Book Awards - 2007". National Book Foundation. http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2007.html. Retrieved 2012-01-24.
External links
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Oxford Companion to African American Literature
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature
The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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