Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ralph Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, published in 1952, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953. A 1965 poll of 200 critics, authors, and editors named it the most important American novel since World War II.
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on the 1st of March 1913 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He was named after the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by his father, Lewis Alfred Ellison.
Invisible Man follows an unnamed African-American narrator from the Deep South to New York City in the 1930s. The narrator is described as figuratively invisible because people refuse to see him; the novel explores racism, communism, identity, and alienation.
Ellison worked on a second novel for roughly 40 years but never completed it. A 1967 house fire in Plainfield, Massachusetts destroyed more than 300 pages of the manuscript, and Ellison ultimately left more than 2,000 pages unfinished at his death. A condensed version, Juneteenth, was published in 1999, and the full surviving manuscripts appeared in 2010 as Three Days Before the Shooting...
Ellison received the National Book Award in 1953, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, the National Medal of Arts in 1985, and two President's Medals from Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. France awarded him a State Medal and made him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1970. Harvard University gave him an honorary doctorate.
Ralph Ellison died on the 16th of April 1994 of pancreatic cancer. He was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.