Don Shares Importance of Ralph Ellison on Audible’s Founding Vision

Don was featured in the Fall 2022 issue of Humanities Magazine, honoring the 70th anniversary of the publication of Ralph Ellison’s iconic novel, Invisible Man.

Don shared how Ellison influenced the founding of Audible and Don’s vision to bring Ellison’s words to life.

Read the full article, written by Eugene Holley, Jr., here, and an excerpt from the piece below:

Not surprisingly, given his studious approach to writing, Ellison enjoyed teaching. He taught at Bard College, the University of Chicago, Rutgers University, and New York University, where he taught literature from 1970 to 1979. One of his most devoted students in the early seventies was Don Katz, who went on to become a writer and the founder and executive chairman of the audio and podcast company Audible.

“I found out that [Ellison] taught a small colloquium, mostly for upperclassmen, and I talked my way into it,” Katz recalls. “I couldn’t believe the depth of the teaching, because Ralph, it turned out, was a deep and profound student of American vernacular, going way back and to a period when the voice of American literature was studied very technically and deeply in the twenties by people like I. E. Richards and Constance Rourke on folklore and the like. I reread Twain and other people through Ellison’s sophisticated teaching. And I felt like I was learning to read all over again. He taught me how to think about the sound and concept of literate listening, which is basically what I evoked when I started Audible.”

Katz’s company features an audiobook of Invisible Man with the voice of the narrator by noted actor Joe Morton, who also adds his voice to the Audible-produced show Jazz in the Key of Ellison, a theater revue dedicated to Ralph Ellison’s writing on jazz and his favorite musicians. The first show, which featured Wynton Marsalis and singers Patti Austin, Angelique Kidjo, and Catherine Russell, debuted at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on November 1, 2016.

“I had been thinking for years that I had to figure out a way to honor Ralph: His teachings are the spiritual guidance that created Audible and brought the integrity of the literary experience of reading into modern culture,” Katz says. “The concert was an idea of an evening that melded together the sounds of his words and the sounds of the jazz he loved, with visuals. Joe Morton reads [from Invisible Man], with a walking bassline and a really sophisticated tenor sax underneath. It had this amazing opening, and then it did a road show version that just ended.”