“You are hereby warned,” Ralph Ellison wrote to his friend Albert Murray in 1951, “that I have dropped the shuck.” After years of struggle and doubt, Ellison had finished “Invisible Man,” his epic of midcentury African-American life. The novel would win the National Book Award. His life was about to change.

An essential new book, “The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison,” presents this writer in all his candor, seriousness, outrage and wit. Nearly all of these letters are previously unpublished. What brings them alive is that while they brood on the largest of issues — identity, alienation, the political responsibilities of the artist — they’re earthy and squirming with all the vital things of everyday experience.

You move from the cascade of Ellison’s thinking about art and ideas, for example, to one of the funniest and warmest letters I’ve ever read. It too is to Murray, the influential critic; these two men found something deeply congenial in each other. It’s about the problem of finding the ingredients Ellison needs to cook pigs’ trotters while a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1956. He misses home cooking amid all the highbrow pasta.

“I went into stores and did everything from inventing new dances to standing on my head and pulling out my pecker trying to make them understand pickling spice and they dragged out everything from tomato paste to embalming fluid — everything and anything except pickling spice,” Ellison wrote. “Never in the history of the world did a mess of pigs’ feet cause so much exasperation. I returned to the academy beat to my socks and prepared to assassinate the first person who spoke to me and fortunately no one did.”