Jerry Watts's 1994 book Heroism and the Black Intellectual was the first to treat at length throughout the contradictions of Ralph Ellison's cultural and political position. Watts saw Ellison's hesitation to support vigorously the 1960s struggle for racial and social justice in America as a kind of truancy, an abandonment of an earlier principle. In Watts's view, Ellison endorsed a fairly conservative idea called black exceptionalism – the hero's triumph against the odds – as a means of outwitting the peril of racism. In order to strengthen his claim that Ellison became isolated from the civil rights movement and even broader shifts in American society, Watts offered a critique of Ellison's psychological make-up, picking up the controversy over Ellison's career where it had been left in the early 1970s, when Ellison faced boos when he ventured to make a speech.