Ralph Ellison
American novelist, author of Invisible Man (1952). Mailer appraised him in "Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room" (59.10) and shared the platform with him at the December 1959 University of Iowa symposium (59.18).
Ralph Ellison enters this register twice in 1959: among the contemporaries Mailer sized up in “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room” (59.10), and as a fellow panelist — with Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, and Mark Harris — at the University of Iowa “Writer in a Mass Culture” symposium reported in 59.18.