Going to the Territory was published by Random House in 1986 — Ellison’s last book published in his lifetime and his second collection of essays, extending the intellectual project of Shadow and Act into the 1970s and 1980s. The title comes from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn — Huck’s declaration that he’ll “light out for the territory” — and Ellison transforms it into a metaphor for the African American experience: always going to the territory, always moving into unknown ground, always improvising.
The Essays
The collection includes sixteen pieces written between 1957 and 1985:
“Going to the Territory” — the title essay, delivered as an address at Brown University, traces the connections between frontier experience, African American migration, and artistic creation. Ellison argues that black Americans are the quintessential Americans — the people who most fully embody the national experience of displacement, reinvention, and improvisation.
“The Little Man at Chehaw Station” — perhaps the finest essay in the collection. Ellison recounts a music teacher’s warning that even at a tiny train station in Alabama, there might be a listener who knows more about music than you do. The essay becomes a meditation on the hidden sophistication of American culture — the way excellence circulates in unexpected places.
“What These Children Are Like” — on teaching and the assumptions educators bring to black children: that they are culturally deprived rather than culturally different.
“Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday” — a personal tribute that is also one of the most perceptive short pieces ever written about Ellington’s significance.
“Portrait of Inman Page” — on a black educator who embodied the highest standards of learning and character.
The Position
By 1986, Ellison’s intellectual position had been under attack for two decades. The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s had accused him of accommodationism, of being insufficiently militant, of valuing Western literary tradition over black cultural expression. Younger black writers — Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Ishmael Reed — had explicitly rejected his example.
Going to the Territory is Ellison’s implicit response: not defensive but deepening. He continues to insist on complexity, on the impossibility of reducing American culture to racial categories, on the artist’s obligation to craft rather than ideology. The essays are, if anything, more confident than those in Shadow and Act — the work of a man who has absorbed the criticism and remains unshaken.
Collecting Going to the Territory
First edition (Random House, New York, 1986): Black cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket with photographic portrait.
Identification points:
- “First Edition” stated on copyright page
- Random House colophon
- 338 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $75–$200. More readily available than Shadow and Act (larger first printing, more recent publication).
Signed copies: $400–$1,000. Ellison’s advanced age (he was seventy-three) limited his signing appearances.
The book completes the Ellison nonfiction canon and is collected as the final authorized volume by one of America’s most important intellectuals. Its value increases as Ellison’s reputation stabilizes at the highest level.