Focuses on the little-known but important friendship between two canonical American writers. The story of this fifty-year friendship, however, is more than literary biography. Bryan Crable argues that the Burke-Ellison relationship can be interpreted as a microcosm of the American 'racial divide'. Through examination of published writings and unpublished correspondence, he reconstructs the dialogue between Burke and Ellison about race that shaped some of their most important works, including Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and Ellison's Invisible Man.
