Ralph Ellison

JAZZ IMAGES WHAT "Kindred Cool: Portraits Inspired by the Jazz Friendship of Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden and Albert Murray" is created from photography by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn WHEN|WHERE Today, tomorrow and Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. at the Museum of...

American flags will be in abundance when the Democratic National Convention opens Monday in Denver. I suspect that no one will mention the denunciation earlier this year of presidential candidate Barack Obama for not wearing a flag lapel pin ("What's he...

While some children are lamenting the end of summer, a group of students at a South Side charter school can't wait to go back to school Monday because they will return to a sparkling new campus. "I'm just happy to have a school now," said Dextavius...

In protest of Chicago's failing school system, Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) is staging a field trip of sorts. He's urging kids from his legislative district to skip the first day of school, board buses, travel to Winnetka, and attempt to enroll in New...

In his Blowback, "Stop cheering on charter schools," Mathew C. Taylor mentions California's high teacher-student ratios as problematic for the state. Other union leaders and Los Angeles school administrators also needle teachers with the ever-looming...

June 24, 2008 Joseph O'Neill's fourth book and third novel, "Netherland," has introduced the unlikely phrase "cricket novel" into the literary lexicon. The story is told in the voice of Hans Van der Broek, a Dutch banker living in New York with his...

Classics can not only change your life, but even help to shape an entire country's self-image. Here are some classic 'national works' from the U.S. and beyond to put on your summer reading list. China: Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West, 1590s One of the...

NATIONAL PRESS CLUB SPEAKER BREAKFAST WITH THE REVEREND DR. JEREMIAH WRIGHT, SENIOR PASTOR OF THE TRINITY UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS TOPIC: THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE MODERATOR: DONNA LEINWAND, REPORTER, USA TODAY, AND...

In a city whose streets commemorate fascist pilots and other controversial figures, it should have been a rubber-stamped request: a street, a statue, maybe a school named in honor of Saul Bellow, one of America's greatest writers and a Chicago literary...

On April 16, 1994, a writer famous for a singular and bone-deep literary accomplishment died in his Riverside Drive apartment in Manhattan, his sweet and elegant wife, Fanny, by his side. It was pancreatic cancer that laid him low, then silenced him. He...

Peanut butter and some of the most courageous fighter pilots of World War II share common roots. So do author Ralph Ellison and the first African- American four-star general. All are products of the only college or university designated a national...

What do 17-year-olds know? Not a whole lot, according to a study released last week by Common Core, a nonpartisan research group. Responding to what it sees as an overemphasis on reading and math at the expense of a liberal arts education, the group asked...