Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison, who was named after the writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in Oklahoma City. His father died in an industrial accident when he was a young boy, so his mother took him and his brother to Gary, Indiana, where she thought they would find better opportunities. (This move is no doubt the inspiration for the first story in The Black Ball, “Boy on a Train.”) They eventually returned to Oklahoma, and Ellison worked a series of odd jobs while growing up. As a teenager, he was a star football player and became particularly passionate about music, which won him a scholarship to the Tuskegee Institute (a prominent Black college) in 1933. While he found many aspects of Tuskegee frustrating, particularly as he was much poorer than most of the other students, it also gave him the opportunity to hone his musical skills and begin seriously studying literature for the first time. Instead of finishing his degree, he decided to leave and move to New York, where the Harlem Renaissance was underway. He met many of the movement’s most prominent figures, including fellow writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and began publishing articles, book reviews, and short stories. During this period, he also worked on the Federal Writers’ Project (a New Deal program to provide work for writers during the Depression), joined the Communist Party, and married the actress Rosa Poindexter (but they divorced in 1943). Ellison also joined the Merchant Marines near the end of World War II and then married the writer Fanny McConnell in 1946. He dedicated the next five years to writing his masterpiece, Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and made him an international celebrity. He spent the rest of his life writing and teaching at various universities, primarily in the Northeast of the U.S. Famously perfectionistic, Ellison was never fully satisfied with Invisible Man and spent the rest of his life writing a second novel, which he never finished. (Different versions were published after his death as Juneteenth and Three Days Before the Shooting…) In fact, the only other books he published during his life were the essay collections Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, and to this day his name is virtually synonymous with Invisible Man.