Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison (born March 1, 1913, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.—died April 16, 1994, Manhattan, New York) was an American writer who won eminence with his first novel (and the only one published during his lifetime), Invisible Man (1952). A powerful study of race and identity, it won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction, making Ellison the first Black author to win that honor. Near the close of the 20th century, Ellison’s fellow writer Saul Bellow said of Invisible Man, “This book holds its own among the best novels of the century.” Ellison also published many short stories and essays about music, literature, and American and African American culture. His second novel, Juneteenth, was never completed in his lifetime but was posthumously released in a shortened form in 1999.

Early life in Oklahoma City

He was one of three sons born to Lewis and Ida (née Millsap) Ellison, who named him for the 19th-century Transcendentalist poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. His older brother, Alfred, died in infancy; his younger brother, Herbert, was born in 1916, the same year that their father, who delivered coal and ice, died in a work-related accident. After his death, the family became impoverished, and Ellison’s mother worked a series of menial jobs. For a short time, the family tried their luck in Gary, Indiana, where Ida Ellison’s brother lived, but they soon returned to Oklahoma City.

Ralph Ellison’s first love was music—jazz, Classical, blues, and spirituals. He began playing the trumpet when he was eight years old and intended to become composer or a musician. Meanwhile, he worked at odd jobs, including busboy, waiter, and shoeshine boy. Notably, he developed cultivated tastes from a young age, developing a snobbery that, as the critic Hilton Als wrote, “sharpened his satirical lens.” After becoming a successful writer, Ellison explained in an interview:

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African American literature: Ralph Ellison

As a kid I remember working it out this way: there was a world in which you wore your everyday clothes on Sunday, and there was a world in which you wore your Sunday clothes every day—I wanted the world in which you wore your Sunday clothes every day. I wanted it because it represented something better, a more exciting and civilized and human way of living…And for me none of this was hopelessly beyond the reach of my Negro world, really; because if you worked and you fought for your rights, and so on, you could finally achieve it. This involved our American Negro faith in education, of course, and the idea of self-cultivation—although I couldn’t have put it that way back during the days when the idea first seized me.

Education at Tuskegee and literary influences

In 1933 Ellison enrolled at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University), a historically Black college in Tuskegee, Alabama. He was so destitute at the time, he had to hitch rides on freight trains to make it to Alabama. Although he majored in music, he worked in the college library and read widely. Among the influential writers he read were Ernest Hemingway, whom he considered to be his “father-as-artist,” and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose 1866 novel Crime and Punishment planted the seeds for some of the themes in Invisible Man.

The literary work that had the greatest influence on Ellison was T.S. Eliot’s Modernist 1922 poem The Waste Land. In 1952 Ellison told The New York Times, “It got me interested in literature. I tried to understand it better and that led me to reading criticism. I then started looking for Eliot’s kind of sensibility in Negro poetry, and I didn’t find it until I ran into Richard Wright.”

Meeting Richard Wright and working for the Federal Writers’ Project

In 1936, after three years’ study, Ellison moved to New York City to study sculpture and earn money for his senior year at Tuskegee. He never returned to school. Within days of arriving in Harlem, he befriended the poet Langston Hughes. Later he met Wright, a budding writer who encouraged Ellison to try his hand at writing.

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In 1937 Ellison’s mother died in Dayton, Ohio, and he briefly lived there with his brother before returning to New York City. He also began contributing short stories, reviews, and essays to various periodicals, including the left-wing New Masses and The New Republic.

Joining Wright, he worked from 1938 to 1942 on the Federal Writers’ Project, a program established by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal struggle against the Great Depression. Ellison’s work with the project, which involved interviewing Harlem’s African American residents and collecting folk stories and songs, was important to his development as a writer. He would later say, “Some of those interviews affirmed the stories that I had heard from my elders as I grew up. They gave me a much richer sense of what the culture was. I might say it was like taking a course in history.” After this work concluded, he followed with a stint as the managing editor of The Negro Quarterly for just under a year.

Writing Invisible Man

Ellison had a brief marriage (1938–43) to Rose Poindexter, a singer, actress, and dancer. After their marriage ended, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine and served for two years in World War II as a cook. Following his service, he married Fanny McConnell Buford, a Kentucky transplant in Harlem who supported him and his writing career through a series of administrative jobs. Ellison also received a grant from the Rosenwald Fund and financial support from Ida Guggenheimer, a wealthy civil rights advocate, to produce Invisible Man.

The novel was an immediate critical and popular success. The story is a bildungsroman that tells of a naive and idealistic (and, significantly, nameless) Southern Black youth who goes to Harlem, joins the fight against white oppression, and ends up ignored by his fellow Black citizens as well as by the white people he encounters.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

The novel won praise for its stylistic innovations in infusing classic literary motifs with modern Black speech and culture, while providing a thoroughly unique take on the construction of contemporary African American identity. Notably, there are autobiographical elements in the novel. Like Ellison, Invisible Man’s protagonist attends a Southern Black college and has a keen knowledge of music. (At the story’s beginning, the narrator describes the experience of listening to a recording of Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” while under the influence of reefer.) Yet the novel also fuses realism and surrealism in chilling scenes such as the first chapter’s battle royal, a boxing match in which the protagonist and nine other young Black men are made to fight each other while blindfolded for the entertainment of a group of white men. Immediately after the match the protagonist and other fighters are tricked into picking up coins from an electrified carpet.

Ellison’s work was hailed by critics, although in 1970 he recalled in an interview that one reviewer had described the book as “a literary race riot.” In addition, Ellison’s treatment of his novel as first and foremost a work of art—as opposed to a primarily polemical work—led to some complaints from his fellow Black novelists at the time that he was not sufficiently devoted to social change. Indeed, Invisible Man uses satire to take aim at ideologies that Ellison had once embraced or entertained but ultimately rejected, including communism (which had found a believer in Wright) and the Black nationalist movement led by Marcus Garvey. The novel’s protagonist joins a communist-like group of white leftists called the Brotherhood and becomes a target of a West Indian Pan-Africanist named Ras the Destroyer, who considers Ellison’s narrator a “race traitor.”

But of the novel’s critics, Ellison once called them “shortsighted,” noting that, to them, “my racial identity was more important than what I was writing about or how I managed to write [Invisible Man].” More critics recognized the novel for its greatness than its perceived faults. Invisible Man is included on several lists of the best and most important novels of the 20th century and is regarded as a classic work of American and African American literature.

Later writings, honors, and death

After Invisible Man appeared, Ellison was awarded the Prix de Rome by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955, and he and his wife spent two years living in Rome, where Ellison worked on essays about jazz. He published two collections of essays: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). He lectured widely on Black culture, folklore, and creative writing and taught at various American colleges and universities.

In 1966 he was named an honorary consultant to the U.S. Library of Congress, and three years later he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson. Ellison was also made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 1970 and awarded the National Medal of Arts from Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1985. Ellison died from pancreatic cancer at age 81 in 1994.

Juneteenth and other posthumous publications

Ellison left a second novel unfinished at his death that he had been working on since his fellowship in Rome. Portions of the novel had been published in several periodicals, but in 1967 significant revisions of the manuscript were destroyed in a house fire. The novel was published in 1999, in a much-shortened form, as Juneteenth, a reference to the Juneteenth holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. In 2010 all surviving manuscripts and excerpts of the unfinished novel were published in Three Days Before the Shooting….

(Read Charles Blow’s Britannica essay on the Juneteenth holiday.)

Ellison’s book Flying Home and Other Stories was published posthumously in 1996. Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray was published in 2000; it contains a decade’s worth of correspondence between Ellison and Murray, a professor at Tuskegee, engaging on such topics as jazz and contemporary literature. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison was released in 2019.