Ralph Ellison

Biography

Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913-1994) was born in Oklahoma City, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson. He studied music at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama — not literature — and was an accomplished trumpet player. He moved to New York in 1936 and fell into the orbit of Richard Wright and the Left. He spent seven years writing Invisible Man, published in 1952; it won the National Book Award the following year. He spent the rest of his life working on a second novel, a massive manuscript about race and American identity, which remained unfinished when he died. A fire destroyed much of an early draft. The surviving pages were edited and published as Juneteenth (1999) and, more fully, as Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010).

Ralph Ellison at a glance