Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Ellison, a construction worker and small businessman who sold ice and coal, and Ida Millsap Ellison, who worked as a domestic and canvassed for the Socialist Party ^[1]. His father named him after the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, hoping the boy would become a poet, a fact Ellison later treated with both irony and pride in his own essays ^[2].

Lewis Ellison died in 1917 after an operating accident involving a block of ice, leaving Ida to raise Ralph and his younger brother Herbert in difficult circumstances ^[1]. Oklahoma had entered the union only in 1907, and Ellison later argued that its frontier character gave Black residents a wider sense of possibility than the older states of the Deep South, even under segregation. He grew up around musicians, church people, and workingmen, absorbing the blues and jazz culture of a city that produced the guitarist Charlie Christian and hosted touring bands led by figures such as the territory orchestras of the Southwest ^[2].

Music came first. Ellison studied the trumpet from childhood, played in school bands, and set his ambitions on becoming a composer of symphonies. In 1933 he won admission to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to study music, and, lacking train fare, he rode freight cars part of the way south to get there ^[1].

At Tuskegee, Ellison studied under the choir director William L. Dawson and worked toward a career in classical composition, but his reading widened faster than his coursework. An encounter with T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land in the college library startled him: he recognized in its rhythms something akin to jazz, and he began tracing the poem's allusions through criticism and modern literature ^[2]. That private education pulled him steadily toward writing.

In the summer of 1936, short of money for his final year, Ellison went to New York City intending to earn tuition and study sculpture. He never returned to Tuskegee as a student. In Harlem he met the poet Langston Hughes and, crucially, the novelist Richard Wright, who encouraged him to try a book review and then a short story for the magazine New Challenge in 1937 ^[3]. Wright's example and the intellectual circles around the Federal Writers' Project, which employed Ellison from 1938 collecting folklore and oral histories in Harlem, gave him both a craft apprenticeship and a deep archive of Black urban speech ^[1].

Through the late 1930s and the war years Ellison published stories, reviews, and essays in left-wing journals such as New Masses, gradually moving away from the Communist-aligned politics of that milieu as he grew skeptical of its treatment of Black Americans ^[3]. During the Second World War he served in the Merchant Marine as a cook, a choice he made in preference to serving in a segregated army ^[1]. In 1945, while on sick leave at a friend's farm in Vermont, he wrote a sentence that arrived almost unbidden: a nameless narrator declaring himself an invisible man. The novel that grew from it would occupy the next seven years ^[2].

Invisible Man appeared in April 1952 from Random House. Its unnamed Black narrator moves from a humiliating battle royal in the South, through a Tuskegee-like college and a paint factory in New York, into a Harlem political organization called the Brotherhood, and finally underground into a light-flooded basement where he tells his story. The book fused realism, folklore, surrealism, and the structures of blues and jazz into something American fiction had not seen before ^[2].

The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, making Ellison the first African American writer to receive the honor, ahead of finalists who included Ernest Hemingway ^[4]. Critics quickly ranked it among the essential postwar American novels, and a 1965 Book Week poll of some two hundred critics, authors, and editors named Invisible Man the most distinguished American novel published since the Second World War ^[1]. It remains a fixture of university syllabi and has stayed continuously in print since publication.

Ellison's second great achievement was as an essayist. Shadow and Act (1964) collected two decades of writing on literature, jazz, and the intertwined character of Black and white American culture, and Going to the Territory followed in 1986 ^[3]. In these essays he argued that Black Americans were not marginal victims but co-creators of the national culture, an argument that put him at odds with some Black nationalist critics in the 1960s but that later generations of scholars largely adopted. Among the honors that followed were the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, awarded by Lyndon B. Johnson, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1970 ^[5]. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, from 1970 to 1979, held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at New York University ^[1].

Ellison married Rose Poindexter, a stage performer, in 1938; the marriage ended in divorce in the mid 1940s. In 1946 he married Fanny McConnell, a graduate of the University of Iowa who had worked in theater and for the Urban League. Fanny Ellison managed much of the practical side of his career, typing manuscripts, handling correspondence, and supporting the household during the long years he worked on Invisible Man ^[6]. The couple had no children and remained together until his death.

Away from the desk Ellison kept the habits of a craftsman. He was a serious amateur photographer, built audio equipment and furniture by hand, and remained a devoted student of jazz, writing memorably about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and the Oklahoma City blues shouter Jimmy Rushing ^[3]. From the 1950s the Ellisons lived in an apartment on Riverside Drive in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and they kept a summer house in Plainfield, Massachusetts ^[1].

That Plainfield house was the scene of the most discussed misfortune of his later life: a fire in November 1967 that Ellison said destroyed a substantial section of the manuscript of his second novel ^[6]. Scholars examining his papers have since debated how much was actually lost, but the fire entered literary legend as an emblem of the book that would not come.

The unfinished second novel dominated Ellison's last four decades. He began it in the 1950s, published eight excerpts in journals between 1960 and 1977, and kept revising and expanding the material, eventually accumulating thousands of pages of typescript and computer files ^[6]. The story centered on Alonzo Hickman, a Black jazzman turned preacher, and Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting New England senator with a hidden past in Hickman's care. Ellison never judged it finished, and its non-appearance became one of the famous silences of American literature.

He remained a public intellectual all the same. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers, the University of Chicago, and New York University, lectured widely, and served on national bodies including the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, whose 1967 report helped shape the creation of American public broadcasting ^[1]. He also served as a charter member of the National Council on the Arts. Honorary degrees came from Tuskegee, Harvard, and other universities ^[5].

Ellison died of pancreatic cancer at his Manhattan home on April 16, 1994, at the age of 80, and was buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights ^[7]. His literary executor, John F. Callahan, assembled from the vast manuscript a single narrative published in 1999 as Juneteenth, and in 2010 a much fuller scholarly edition of the material appeared as Three Days Before the Shooting ^[6].

Any account of Ralph Ellison achievements begins with the durability of Invisible Man. The Modern Library placed it at number 19 on its 1998 list of the century's best English-language novels, and the book continues to sell steadily and to anchor courses in American literature ^[4]. Writers as different as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Paul Beatty worked in a space his novel opened, and the phrase invisible man passed into ordinary American speech as shorthand for people a society refuses to see.

His critical legacy proved just as lasting. Ellison's insistence that American culture is irreversibly composite, that its music, speech, and humor are joint Black and white creations, moved from a contested position in the 1960s to something close to scholarly consensus ^[3]. His essays on jazz are still cited by music historians, and his exchanges with the critic Irving Howe over the obligations of the Black writer remain standard reading in debates about art and protest.

Institutions have kept his name in public view. His papers reside at the Library of Congress, a memorial sculpture by Elizabeth Catlett, inspired by Invisible Man, was dedicated on Riverside Drive in Manhattan in 2003, and the Ralph Ellison Library in Oklahoma City, opened in 1975, serves the neighborhoods where he grew up ^[1][7]. Arnold Rampersad's full-scale 2007 biography and a steady stream of academic studies confirm that basic Ralph Ellison facts, one novel published in his lifetime, one National Book Award, decades of essays, add up to one of the largest single footprints in twentieth century American writing ^[1].