Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on the 1st of March 1913 in Oklahoma City. His family moved to Gary, Indiana in 1916 before returning to Oklahoma where he worked various jobs including busboy and shoeshine boy.
A house fire destroyed more than three hundred pages of his second novel manuscript during 1967. He wrote over two thousand pages of unfinished work spanning four decades which were later published as Three Days Before the Shooting... on the 26th of January 2010 by Modern Library.
Invisible Man was published in 1952 and won the 1953 US National Book Award for Fiction. The book established his career trajectory and gained him admission to American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Composer William L. Dawson taught music while piano instructor Hazel Harrison provided lessons. Librarian Walter Bowie Williams shared knowledge about James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and English teacher Morteza Drexel Sprague introduced him to literature as a living art form.
Ralph Waldo Ellison died on the 16th of April 1994 from pancreatic cancer. He is interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.