SOURCE: "Blues People," in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited and with an introduction by John F. Callahan, The Modern Library, 1995, pp. 278-87.

In the following review, which originally appeared in The New York Review on February 6, 1964, Ellison points to both positive and negative aspects of Blues People.

In his introduction to Blues People LeRoi Jones advises us to approach the work as

… a strictly theoretical endeavor. Theoretical, in that none of the questions it poses can be said to have been answered definitely or for all time (sic!), etc. In fact, the whole book proposes more questions than it will answer. The only questions it will properly move to answer have, I think, been answered already within the patterns of American life. We need only give these patterns serious scrutiny and draw certain permissible conclusions.

It is a useful warning and one hopes that it will...