Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison (b. 1913–d. 1994) is among the most enduring and important American authors of the mid-twentieth century. Invisible Man along with his short stories, essays, and follow-up novel are as relevant in the 2020s as ever, and the reliable appearance of new books and articles on it suggest it was imbued with dynamism and sophistication to carry it far into the future. Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913. He attended Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936 and majored in music while also studying literature. He left without receiving a degree and moved to New York to try his hand in the arts, first thinking he might become a sculptor. He met Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, who encouraged him. He attained some success as a critic and fiction writer from c. 1937–1943 (also serving as managing editor of The Negro Quarterly during its brief run). He served in the US merchant marine from 1943 to 1945. He started what would become Invisible Man in 1945, and it was published to wide acclaim in 1952. He worked on a follow-up novel for the next forty-two years and did not publish it, although portions were published in 1999 and 2010. He published eight excerpts during his lifetime. His nonfiction collections, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), were also well received, with the former establishing him as a major public intellectual and cultural commentator. He was married twice, with his second marriage to Fanny McConnell lasting from 1946 until his death in 1994. He had no children. He held numerous professorships, most significantly holding the Albert Schweitzer chair at New York University from 1970 to 1979. John F. Callahan became his literary executor and worked diligently to ensure Ellison’s works either stayed in print or were published for the first time. Ellison occupies a Janus-like position in American culture, thoroughly grounded in the nineteenth century, completely of his moment, yet looking forward in a way to which hundreds of recent articles can attest. “Upon the widening shelf of Ellison criticism, one sees a bit of everything,” wrote Robert G. O’Meally in his introduction to New Essays on Invisible Man in 1988 (p. 5). The Ellison shelf O’Meally had in mind in 1988 has expanded dramatically, and we have tried here to capture the most important and influential works. Invisible Man, for instance, first perhaps associated with and celebrated for its anti-communism, later became associated with the growth of critical interest in African American expressive traditions, such as signifyin’ and the blues. In the 1990s, the novel’s celebration of democracy found favor, as did its jazz-adjacent aesthetic. Even more significant for Ellison’s reputation, Invisible Man (and Ellison’s other published works) caught the crest of the wave that saw the study of African American literature and culture brought into the mainstream study of American literature and culture. This story is much more complex than there is space to relate here. Larry Neal, in his discourse-changing essay from 1970, “Ellison’s Zoot Suit” (Neal 1987 [cited under Folklore]), sums it up best with an enduring truth that we believe will become evident to the reader of this bibliography: “Well, there is one thing that you have to admit. And that is, dealing with Ralph Ellison is no easy matter. It is no easy task to fully characterize the nature of Ellison’s life and work. He cannot be put into any one bag and conveniently dispensed with. Any attempt to do so merely leads to aesthetic and ideological oversimplifications. . . . To overlook the complex dimensions of a man’s ideas, character, and personality is to do great disservice to the righteous dissemination of knowledge” (p. 31).