Biography of arnold rampersad

He has held teaching positions at Stanford, Rutgers, and Columbia. From to , he held a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Although he began his career specializing in Herman Melville, Rampersad is best known for biographies of W. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. In The Art and Imagination of W. Du Bois , 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 — , 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. 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 s and the s.

Critic and biographer Arnold Rampersad.

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 , tennis star Arthur Ashe's autobiography, which Rampersad coauthored, and in the biography Jackie Robinson , 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 , Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison was welcomed by many reviewers as a definitive study.