Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison (b. 1913–d. 1995) is best known as the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952), which in 1953 became the first book by an African American to win the National Book Award. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Ellison would later come to credit his “frontier” upbringing for giving him a perspective on race, literature, and the possibilities of democratic citizenship that distinguished him from many of his Southern-born peers and predecessors, especially the Mississippi-born Richard Wright, the author of Native Son (1940). Influenced by jazz and blues musicians who frequented Oklahoma City, Ellison decided to become a musician and went to Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) to study with William Levi Dawson. While there, he found his English courses with Morteza Drexel Sprague more compelling. After his junior year at Tuskegee in 1936, Ellison went to New York City, intending to earn enough money working as a waiter to pay for his senior year, but he never returned. There he became friends with the poet Langston Hughes, who introduced him to Wright. Wright invited him to write a review for the radical magazine New Challenge, which would become Ellison’s first published essay. This set the stage for Ellison’s securing a research position with the Federal Writers’ Project in New York in 1938. In the next few years Ellison wrote essays and reviews for leftist magazines and journals and for two years (1942–1943) was the managing editor of Negro Quarterly. Awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1945, Ellison began writing Invisible Man, the first chapter of which he published in the British magazine Horizon in 1947. The novel was published to great acclaim and controversy in 1952, receiving significant review in the mainstream press. He spent the rest of his life working on his never-finished second novel. Nonetheless, Ellison distinguished himself as an essayist and commentator on American life and literature in two well-regarded essay collections, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). Following his death, Ellison’s literary executor, Professor John F. Callahan, brought out several volumes of Ellison’s writing, most notably, two versions of the second novel: Juneteenth (1995) and, with Adam Bradley, Three Days Before the Shooting (2010); the Collected Essays (1995) and a volume of short stories, Flying Home and Other Stories (1995). Ellison’s papers are available in the Ralph Ellison Papers at the Library of Congress.