Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo 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 a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man (ISBN 0-679-60139-2), which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). Research by Lawrence Jackson, Ellison's biographer, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought.

Biography

In 1933, Ellison 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, Wright encouraged Ellison 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 WWII 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.

Invisible Man explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1940’s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters who are dispassionate, educated, articulate and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The groundbreaking novel, with its treatment of previously taboo issues such as incest and white America's distorted perceptions of black sexuality, won the National Book Award in 1953.

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 wrote an essay that appeared in a Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest in 1957. In 1958, he returned to the United States to take a position teaching American & Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth.

In 1964, Ellison published Shadow And Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Rutgers and Yale, and continued to work on his novel. 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, where he lost 300 pages of his second novel manuscript. 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 over 2000 pages, the book would not be completed in his lifetime.

Writing essay about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, 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 became 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.

Ellison was also an accomplished sculptor, musician and photographer and college professor. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994, and was buried in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. His wife, who survived him, lived until November 19, 2005.

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 (ISBN 0-394-46457-5), was published. It was a 368-page condensation of over 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of forty years.

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)
• Battle Royal (1952)
• Shadow and Act (1964) (ISBN 0-679-76000-8)
• Going to the Territory (1985)(ISBN 0-679-76001-6)
• On Being the Target of Discrimination (1989) (appeared in a New York Times Magazine supplement called "A World of Difference")
• Juneteenth (1999) published posthumously

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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

Credits

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