Ralph Ellison

• 1. Introduction

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  Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on the 1st of March 1913 in Oklahoma City, named after the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by a father who hoped his son would grow up to be one. That father, Lewis Alfred Ellison, died in 1916 from a work-related injury and a failed operation, leaving a family that would spend the next decade and a half in precarious circumstances. What came out of that precarity was one of the most decorated and debated novels in American literature. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953 and, in a 1965 poll of critics, authors, and editors, was named the most important American novel since World War II. The New York Times would eventually call Ellison "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." But the story of how he got there moves through freight trains, Harlem rooftops, a devastating house fire, and more than 2,000 pages of a second novel he would never finish.

• 2. Oklahoma Roots

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  Lewis Alfred Ellison loved literature and doted on his children. Ralph only learned as an adult that his father had quietly hoped he would become a poet. When Lewis died, Ralph was three years old, and his mother Ida had two surviving sons to raise; an older brother, Alfred, had died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice was born the same year their father died. Ida moved the family north to Gary, Indiana in 1921, believing, as Ellison would later recall her saying, that her sons would have "a better chance of reaching manhood" there. When work dried up, the family returned to Oklahoma, and Ralph took whatever jobs he could find: busboy, shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, dentist's assistant. A neighbor's father gave him free trumpet and saxophone lessons, and by the time he graduated from Douglass High School in 1931, he had served as the school bandmaster. Two figures at Douglass left lasting marks: principal Inman E. Page and his daughter Zelia N. Breaux, a music teacher who deepened Ellison's relationship with performance. He worked for a year after graduation, saved enough for a trumpet, and played with local musicians while continuing lessons.

• 3. Tuskegee and the Literary Awakening

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  Ellison applied twice to Tuskegee Institute, the prestigious all-black university in Alabama founded by Booker T. Washington, before being admitted in 1933 because the orchestra needed a trumpet player. He hopped freight trains to get there. Once enrolled, he found that Tuskegee's social hierarchies were no less rigid than those at white institutions, and that outsider feeling, critic Hilton Als has argued, "sharpened his satirical lens." The music department was among the most renowned at the school, headed by composer William L. Dawson. Piano instructor Hazel Harrison also guided him. But while his coursework was musical, his free time was literary. He cited reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a major awakening. In 1934 he began working as a desk clerk at the university library, where he read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein under the generous tutelage of librarian Walter Bowie Williams. English teacher Morteza Drexel Sprague proved the most transformative influence; Ellison later dedicated Shadow and Act to him. Sprague introduced him to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Ellison identified deeply with what he called their "brilliant, tortured anti-heroes." Ellison left Tuskegee in 1936 without completing his degree.

• 4. Harlem and the Communist Question

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  On the 5th of July 1936, Ellison arrived in New York City and found lodging at a YMCA on 135th Street in Harlem, which he described as "the culture capital of black America." He had come to study sculpture. What he found instead was a literary world. Langston Hughes, described by Ellison as "Harlem's unofficial diplomat" of the Depression era, introduced him to the black literary establishment, including writers with Communist sympathies. Richard Wright, who was then openly associated with the Communist Party, encouraged Ellison to write fiction after reading a book review Ellison had submitted. Ellison's first published story, "Hymie's Bull", drew on his 1933 freight-train ride to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, he published more than 20 book reviews, short stories, and articles in magazines including New Challenge and The New Masses. Both Wright and Ellison eventually became disillusioned with the Communist Party during World War II, concluding that it had betrayed African Americans. In a letter to Wright dated the 18th of August 1945, Ellison wrote with fury about party leadership: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it.... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." That anger fed directly into the composition of Invisible Man.

• 5. Writing Invisible Man

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  Invisible Man was published in 1952 and follows an unnamed African-American narrator from the Deep South to New York City in the 1930s. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense: people, Ellison wrote, "refuse to see" him. The novel addressed communism, incest, and the contrasts between Northern and Southern varieties of racism. Ellison deliberately built his characters differently from contemporaries like Wright and James Baldwin; his protagonist is dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. While he worked on the manuscript, his second wife, Fanny McConnell, helped support the household financially. Fanny was a scholarship graduate of the University of Iowa and a founder of the Negro People's Theater in Chicago; she also typed Ellison's longhand text and helped edit the typescript. She worked for the American Medical Center for Burma Frontiers during the writing period, supporting the medical missionary work of Gordon S. Seagrave. Ellison worked on Invisible Man from roughly 1947 to 1951, supplementing income with book reviews. The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, and Ellison said in his acceptance speech that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel" but remained unsatisfied with the result.

• 6. The Fire and the Unfinished Novel

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  In 1967, a fire at Ellison's summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts destroyed what he said were more than 300 pages of his second novel's manuscript. The loss compounded a perfectionism that had already slowed the work to a crawl. Ellison ultimately produced more than 2,000 pages toward the novel but never brought it to completion. After his death on the 16th of April 1994 from pancreatic cancer, additional manuscripts were found at his home. John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor, distilled those pages into a 368-page novel called Juneteenth, published in 1999. That was a condensation of 40 years of writing. On the 26th of January 2010, Modern Library published the complete mass of surviving manuscripts under the title Three Days Before the Shooting..., giving readers a fuller view of what Ellison had been reaching for across four decades.

• 7. Awards, Friendships, and Later Work

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  Invisible Man's National Book Award opened doors that had been structurally closed to Black writers. Ellison became the first African American admitted to the Century Association and received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. He received President's Medals from both Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, and a State Medal from France. In 1969, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. France made him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1970, the same year he joined New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, a post he held until 1980. In 1975, his hometown of Oklahoma City dedicated the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library in his honor. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1985. During the 1950s he had traveled to Europe, spending time in Rome, where he befriended Robert Penn Warren; Warren later interviewed Ellison for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? on race and the Civil Rights Movement. Ellison corresponded for years with writer Albert Murray, and their letters on jazz, their careers, and the Civil Rights Movement were eventually published in 2000 as Trading Twelves. His 1986 essay collection Going to the Territory examined writers including William Faulkner and Richard Wright, the music of Duke Ellington, and African American contributions to national identity. On the 18th of February 2014, the United States Postal Service issued a 91-cent stamp in his honor as part of its Literary Arts series.

• 8. The Invisible Monument

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  Ellison's interest in audio and electronic technology ran alongside his literary ambitions from boyhood. He spent his childhood taking apart and rebuilding radios, and as an adult he built and customized elaborate hi-fi stereo systems. In a December 1955 essay titled "Living With Music" in High Fidelity magazine, he wrote at length about that passion. Ellison scholar John S. Wright has argued that this facility with electronics shaped how Ellison thought about writing and the novel form itself. That instinct for layered, assembled construction extends to how Ellison's legacy has been gathered and preserved: photographs he took with Gordon Parks, essays assembled into collections, a novel pieced together by an executor from a mountain of notes. Near 730 Riverside Drive in Harlem, where Ellison lived from the early 1950s until his death, a park on 150th Street and Riverside Drive was dedicated to him on the 1st of May 2003. At its center stands a 15 by 8-foot bronze slab bearing a cut-out figure of a man, drawn from Invisible Man. The figure has no face. The monument is literal about what Ellison spent a lifetime describing.