Ralph Ellison, 1913-1994 A Brief Biography

Abstract When one thinks of the African-American writers who began writing in the period just before the flowering of the Civil Rights movement in the mid-r95os, one most often thinks of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Of the three, it was Ellison who found through language a way of encompassing the strange and the familiar and who inspired a new confidence in the infinite possibilities of black folk expression. Although he could trace his lineage, like Wright, to the black belt South, he was decidedly not one of its products. Neither was he descended, like Baldwin, from the great mass of African Americans who headed north during the Great Migration. Ralph Ellison, with the telltale middle name of Waldo, was a midwesterner, a lineage he very proudly claimed, one that by his own admission gave new and by no means unproblematic meaning to the categories ‘black” and ‘:American.” A staunch advocate of the rugged individualism he inherited from his Oklahoma childhood, Ellison brought a unique perspective to the literature he began to create in the r93os. It was a perspective he honed while living in Harlem, the place that took him in when he had to leave a southern black college penniless, forsaking his degree.