Ralph Ellison
 | |
| Born: | March 1, 1913 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA |
|---|---|
| Died: | April 16, 1994 New York, New York, USA |
| Occupation(s): | Writer |
| Magnum opus: | Invisible Man |
Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an African-American scholar and writer who is considered to be one of the most important writers in 20th-century African-American literature. Ellison is best known for Invisible Man, his monumental novel on state of race relations in America, which won the National Book Award in 1953. In addition to Invisible Man, which is considered to be one of the most influential American novels of the 20th-century, Ellison also wrote a number of essays on social, political, and literary issues which were collected in the publications Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). Along with Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison is considered to be one of the most important African-American writers of the latter 20th-century, and Invisible Man in particular is considered to be one of the most comprehensive protrayals of the Black experience in America ever written. Among the African-American writers of his time, Ellison stands out as a unique and at times idiosyncratic figure; although a supporter of civil rights, Ellison was deeply skeptical of the Civil Rights Movement, and he was a vocal critic of both black and white ideologues who attempted to simplify or gloss over the deep complexities of American racism. It is due in large part to Ellison's complex and controverisal views that his works, with their intellectual depth and realism, have survived much better than those of many of his more idealistic contemporaries. His works remain some of the most important and widely-read in all of 20th-century American literature.
Biography
In 1933, a young Ralph Waldo Ellison (named after Ralph Waldo Emerson by his father) entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. He had hopes of writing a symphony. Due to financial difficulties, Ellison was forced to leave Tuskegee after three years. In 1936 Ellison moved to New York City where he met Richard Wright. After writing a book review for Wright, Ellison was encouraged by Wright to pursue a career in writing, specifically fiction. The first published story written by Ellison was a short story entitled "Hymie's Bull," a story inspired by Ellison's hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944 Ellison had over twenty book reviews as well as short stories and articles published in magazines such as New Challenge and New Masses. During World War II Ellison joined the Merchant Marine, and in 1946 he married his second wife, the former Fanny McConnell. She supported her husband financially while he wrote Invisible Man, and typed Ellison's longhand text. She also assisted her husband in editing the typescript as it progressed. The novel immediately won the National Book Award and rocketed Ellison to the height of literary stardom.
Following the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison became an international literary hero. In 1955, he went abroad to Europe to travel and lecture before settling for a time in Rome, Italy, where he composed a series of essays. In 1958, he returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College in New York State. During this time he also began work on his second, unfinished novel, Juneteenth.
In 1964, Ellison published Shadow And Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Rutgers and Yale, while continuing to work on Juneteenth. The following year, a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed Invisible Man as the most important novel since World War II.
In 1968, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his home in New York City; the entire manuscript of Juneteenth was destroyed. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man, that he felt he had made “an attempt at a major novel,” and despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book. The loss of his manuscript pages was devastating to him, and while he ultimately wrote another 2000 pages, the book would not be completed in his lifetime.
Writing essays about the black experience, political subjects, music, and literature, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969, he received the Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was awarded the coveted Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et Lettres by France and he was made a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities.
In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy for the Arts and Letters and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medallion. The following year saw the publication of Going to the Territory, a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and his friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America’s national identity.
Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994, and was buried in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.
After his death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home: And Other Stories in 1996. Five years after his death, under the editorship of John Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor, Ellison's second novel, Juneteenth, was published in the form of 300-page condensation of the thousands of pages of manuscript which Ellison had left unfinished.
Works
- Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (with Albert Murray) (ISBN 0-375-50367-6)
- Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (ISBN 0-679-64034-7)
- The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995) (ISBN 0-679-60176-7)
- Flying Home: and Other Stories (1996)
- Invisible Man (1952)
- Shadow and Act (1964) (ISBN 0-679-76000-8)
- Going to the Territory (1985)(ISBN 0-679-76001-6)
- Juneteenth (1999) (ISBN 0-394-46457-5)
Notes
External links
- Literary Encyclopedia Biography
- Literary Encyclopedia, Invisible Man
- Biography
- PBS
- The Paris Review Interview
- Notes on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
- Saul Bellow's 1952 Review of Invisible Man
- Shadowing Ralph Ellison by John Wright
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