Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He lost his father to an accident when he was two, and soon the family’s life became displaced and economically insecure. Ralph became fascinated and knowledgeable about music, a passion that remained his entire life and that influenced his writing. He attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and was significantly influenced by professors and the wide reading they encouraged. Following a pattern of forging his own way in many pursuits of his life, Ellison left Tuskegee before finishing a degree and moved to Harlem, New York City, in 1936. He was thinking of studying sculpture, but he was immersed in the literary and dramatic and artistic culture of the late Harlem Renaissance. He met Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Romare Bearden, among many others — all influences, all context to his self-education, but characteristically subsidiary to his strong independent core of personality and ambition.

After serving in the Merchant Marine in WWII, Ellison, with the critical financial and editorial support of his second wife, wrote Invisible Man, published in 1952, It is difficult to step back from such a landmark American novel and understand the revolution packed into a seemingly simple account of the life of an unnamed Black man in Harlem in the 1930s. It was not so much an exterior new form as a transfusion of interior power manifested in language, visions, and metaphor. The novel won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison spent the rest of his life writing many published essays, thousands of pages toward a second novel which was never published in his lifetime, and teaching in the universities that represented a formal education which he walked away from so early in his life. His influence may be seen everywhere in American literature, also in world literature; it may be much discussed and traced, but ultimately it is incalculable, visible and invisible simultaneously.