Ralph Ellison Biography Notes

Ralph Ellison Biography
Novelist and essayist, 1914—1994

Ralph Waldo Ellison, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma was the son of Lewis and Ida Ellison who had each grown up in the South to parents who had been slaves. The couple moved out west to Oklahoma hoping the lives of their children would be fueled with a sense of possibility in this state that was reputed for its freedom. Ellison, who first thought he might be a professional musician, played several instruments including the trumpet, which he played in his school band beginning at age eight. During his teenage years, Ellison and his friends imagined being the eclectic combination of frontiersmen and Renaissance Men. The ideal they created gave them the courage to expect anything out of life. They believed that they had the ability and power to do whatever they wanted in life as well as or better than men of any race. At Tuskegee, Ellison excelled in his music program as well as taking a particular liking to his sociology and sculpture classes and the outside classroom which Alabama provided. Though not pleased with the desire of the state's people, black and white, to categorize him as he had never experienced at home, he did appreciate the chance to raise his own consciousness concerning the rest of the country he lived in. Literature would also influence his stay at Tuskegee as he again delved into the expansive libraries at his disposal.
He began reading writers like Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. Especially inspired by Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” Ellison became interested in using the forms of modern literature to describe the daily life of American blacks.

When scholarship money ran out in his third year of college, Ellison moved to New York City, and began living and working in the Harlem YMCA., still hoping to return to Tuskeegee, he never did. Meeting the poet Langston Hughes, and the French writer André Malraux, had a great influence on him, and Ellison also became friendly with another young, struggling writer named Richard Wright. Wright later helped Ellison get a job with the Federal Writer’s Project, where he spent time assembling a wealth of material on black folklore, games, and children’s rhymes.

During the last three years of World War II Ellison served as a cook in the Merchant Marine. In his spare time aboard ship, he wrote short stories and the beginnings of a novel set in a prisoner of war camp. In 1946, he married Fanny McConnell. His novel changed form when, one day, he typed out the words, “I am an invisible man.” After seven years of work, his epic novel Invisible Man, the story of an anonymous black youth growing up in racist America, was published in 1952 to universal acclaim.

Ellison wrote dozens of essays describing the African-American experience, but his second novel was still unfinished when he died 42 years later. On the basis of his first novel, the writer won many honors including the National Book Award, election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1965 a survey of 200 prominent literary figures judged Invisible Man “the most distinguished single work” published in America in the previous 20 years. Ellison spent a great deal of time teaching in various colleges. In 1970, he became the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University. Ellison continued until the day he died spreading and cultivating his vision of America and art: the conscious protagonist and the use of blackness to break categories instead of sustaining them.