Whom would you invite?

 If you could invite a writer from the past to write a piece about our times, whom would you invite? I was thinking about Ralph Ellison, who lived through a lot of outrage. He said: 

You see a situation which outrages you, but as you write about the characters who embody that which outrages, your sense of craft and the moral role of your craft demands that you depict those characters in the breadth of their humanity. You try to give them the density of the human rather than the narrow intensity of the demonic. That means you try to delineate them as men and women who possess feelings and ideals, not matter how much you reject their feelings and ideals.

 

• Source: Ralph Ellison gave an interview to John Hersey, who titled it “A Completion of Personality.” It’s in The Writer’s Craft, edited by John Hersey; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, pp. 267-82. The quotation is on p. 281.