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• Born: 1 March 1914
• Birthplace: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Died: 16 April 1994 (pancreatic cancer)
• Best Known As: Author of Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for his first novel Invisible Man (1952), the story of an alienated and isolated black man living in racially repressive urban America. Ellison grew up in Oklahoma and aimed for a career in jazz music. Instead he moved to New York City in 1936 and turned to writing, encouraged by other African-American writers including Langston Hughes and Ralph Wright. During World War II he served in the Merchant Marines and published short stories. The remarkable success of Invisible Man made Ellison famous worldwide and he was suddenly considered one of America's most important writers. Reluctant to assume the role of a representative for his race, Ellison always maintained that in writing his book he was pursuing art more than he was pursuing racial justice. Although he lectured and published collections of essays (Shadow and Act in 1964 and Going to the Territory in 1986), he worked for forty years on a second novel without finishing it. His literary executor and friend, John Callahan, put together the manuscript after Ellison died and the novel was published as Juneteenth in 1999.

Ellison was named for American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson... Ellison's book should not be confused with The Invisible Man, a science-fiction tale by H. G. Wells.

Ellison, Ralph (1914–1994), sculptor, amateur photographer, electrician, collegiate actor, huntsman, editor, essayist, short story writer, and novelist. Ralph Ellison is recognized nationally and internationally as one of America's most prominent literary personalities. Best known as a novelist, he was also a scholar who taught at many of America's most prestigious colleges and universities and a literary and social critic who prodded America to recognize the humanity of its minorities. And like Nick Aaron Ford, Alain Locke, Hugh M. Gloster, and other Black scholar-critics before him, he was not afraid to chide Black literary artists for not living up to their creative potential. An Uncle Tom to some, a literary father figure to others, Ralph Ellison has secured his niche in the canon of African American and American letters.

Named after another literary giant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on 1 March 1914. His father, Lewis Alfred Ellison, originally from Abbeyville, South Carolina, was a soldier who had served in Cuba, the Philippine Islands, and China before marrying Ida Millsap of White Oak, Georgia, and migrating to Oklahoma, where he became a construction worker and later a small-scale entrepreneur. Ralph Ellison's great-grandparents were slaves, but Ellison insists that they were strong Black people who, during Reconstruction, held their own against southern whites.

An upwardly mobile couple, Lewis and Ida moved to Oklahoma because it was still considered the American frontier, and the Ellisons felt that it would provide better opportunities than the South for self-realization. Still, Oklahoma was not free of prejudice and racism, and Ellison's childhood was, to some extent, circumscribed, but not overly repressive. His father died when he was three years old, so his mother worked as a domestic, a custodian, and sometimes as a cook to support her two sons, Ralph and Herbert.

Growing up in the Southwest did not destroy Ellison's self-image or his will to dream. Desiring to break free of the restrictions of race, Ellison and his childhood friends decided to be Renaissance men, a concept that seems to have acted as a grounding force throughout his life. His activities in high school, his various interests in college—music, literature, sculpture, theater—and his vocation and various avocations as an adult indicate that the concept helped him realize his full potential.

Ellison was educated in a segregated school system in Oklahoma, graduating from Douglas High School in 1931. He excelled in music at Douglas High, but like W. E. B.Du Bois of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, who was given a scholarship to attend Fisk University because the good people of Massachusetts did not want him to integrate their school system, Ellison was given a scholarship to attend Tuskegee Institute (in Alabama) so he would not attend a white college or university in Oklahoma. He was not financially able to attend Tuskegee immediately upon graduation, however, and he matriculated in 1933, after hitching a ride to Alabama on a freight train.

In Going to the Territory (1986), his second book of essays, Ellison describes the South as restrictive because of “the signs and symbols that marked the dividing lines of segregation”.He insists, too, that a great deal of his education at Tuskegee was away “from the use of the imagination, away from the attitudes of aggression and courage… There were things you didn’t do because the world outside was not about to accommodate you”.Ellison was also baffled by the political alliances Tuskegee made with whites, especially the school's relationship with Dr. Robert E. Park, a professor at the University of Chicago's School of Sociology. Ellison observed that it was with the help of Dr. Park, whom many considered the power behind Booker T. Washington, that Tuskegee gained a national reputation. Yet this same sociologist along with Ernest Burgess wrote Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1924), a textbook often used at Tuskegee, in which he disparages the Black man's intellect by affirming that “the Negro is by natural disposition neither an intellectual nor an idealist.… He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak, the lady among the races”.

Despite his misgivings, Ellison found Tuskegee to be a progressive institution. There he met Morteza Sprague, the head of the English department and to whom he later dedicated his first book of essays, Shadow and Act (1964). Ellison went to Tuskegee to study music because William L. Dawson, an accomplished composer and choir director, headed the department. True to his Renaissance man ideal, Ellison studied sculpting under the direction of Eva Hamlin, an art instructor who was later responsible for his meeting and studying with August Savage, a Black sculptor in New York.

Though Ellison made no serious formal attempt to study literature at Tuskegee, it was while working in the library there that he began to explore literature, examining T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Ellison found the poem intriguing because, as he explains in Shadow and Act, he was able to relate his musical experience to it: “Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets”.It was the fascination with the poem's musicality that really got Ellison interested in writing. As he confesses in Going to the Territory, “Somehow in my uninstructed reading of Eliot and Pound, I had recognized a relationship between modern poetry and jazz music. Indeed, such reading and wondering prepared me not simply to meet [Richard] Wright but to seek him out”.

In 1936, at the end of his junior year, Ellison left Tuskegee to find summer employment in New York, hoping to earn enough money to return to his studies in the fall. Though he did not earn enough to get back to Tuskegee, he met Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, and they helped him to meet Richard Wright, who first encouraged him to write. At the time, Wright was the editor of the New Challenge, for the first issue he persuaded Ellison to review Waters Turpin's These Low Grounds. Ellison then wrote a short story, “Hymie Bull”, for the magazine, and his writing career was begun.

The summer Ellison came to New York, the Great Depression had sapped America's economic and industrial growth. The Harlem Renaissance, which depended heavily on white philanthropy for its existence, ran out of steam with the crash of 1929, because many of its patrons were not able to continue their financial support of the movement. Fortunately, the New York Federal Writers' Project was established by the WPA, and Ellison and other writers were able to continue their careers. It was during this time that he worked in the Black community gathering and recording folk material that became an integral aspect of Invisible Man (1952).

Ellison's early writings reflect Richard Wright's creative imagination, but as Ellison continued to hone his craft, his writings demonstrated “the richness and complexity” of his own vision. Mark Busby maintains that Ellison's style was unique because of the way he combined such diverse elements as realism, surrealism, folklore, and myth in Invisible Man. Ellison has written short stories, but he is most recognized for this novel, Shadow and Act, Going to the Territory, and several sections of an unpublished novel. Invisible Man is the story of the nameless narrator, a Black man who learns to assert himself. Shadow and Act has been described as autobiographical, but it only reveals the young Ellison, the Ellison who, to a great extent, is still under the influence of Wright's vision and feels it necessary to defend himself. Going to the Territory reveals a mature Ellison—the literary statesman, the ambassador of good will between the races, the philosopher who believes not so much in the integration of the races as he does in a culturally pluralistic society.

Ellison died on 16 April 1994, leaving unpublished his second novel, which he had begun around 1958. A fire at his summer home in Plainsfield, Massachusetts, destroyed much of the manuscript, forcing him to reconstruct much of what he had already done. At least eight excerpts of the novel have been published, and Ellison appeared on public television and on college campuses reading sections of the work and assuring his audience that the novel was forthcoming. James Alan McPherson, writing in Speaking for You (ed. Kimberly W. Benston, 1987), says of this unpublished work that, though Ellison had written more than enough material for a novel, he was “worried about how the work [would] hold up as a total structure”.McPherson maintains that Ellison achieved a unique style, one that combined elements from minstrelsy and the preaching of Black Baptist ministers, yet had the timing of Count Basie. And of the author's intent McPherson affirms, “Ellison was trying to solve the central problem of American literature. He was trying to find forms invested with enough familiarity to reinvent a much broader and much more diverse world for those who take their provisional identities from groups”.In early 1996 it was announced that Ellison had also left behind six unpublished short stories, all probably predating Invisible Man. Two were immediately printed in the New Yorker (Apr. 29/May 6 issue), and all six were scheduled to be published by Random House in late 1996, together with his previously published stories. In 1996, John F. Callahan edited Flying Home and Other Stories. Callahan also edited segments of Ellison's long-awaited second novel and published it as Juneteenth (1999).

An author's standing in a literary tradition rests on how well he or she perceives that tradition and how much he or she contributes to or changes it. Ellison insists that he was following the great writers of the world and claims as his literary ancestors such giants as T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and William Faulkner. And since his greatest work, Invisible Man, is episodic, he could have added to his literary ancestors Miguel de Cervantes, Alain-Rene Lesage, Thomas Nash, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding. In his use of African American folk material he was following Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston. Though Ellison does not claim Richard Wright as a literary ancestor, he did embrace Wright's vision of naturalistic determinism; however, Ellison found that Wright's vision was too narrow to represent the Black experience in America. He believed that Wright's writing, in many instances, only perpetuated in the larger community stereotypical images that the Black writer should attempt to deflate. In Shadow and Act, Ellison maintained that too many books written by Black authors were aimed at a white audience, the danger in this being that Black writers then tended to limit themselves to their audience's assumptions about what Black people were like or should be like. Because of this dynamic, the Black writer is reduced to pleading the humanity of his own race, which Ellison saw as the equivalent of questioning whether Blacks were fully human, an indulgence in a false issue that Blacks could ill afford. Believing that a naturalistic/deterministic mode could not define the Black experience, Ellison created a style that embraces the strength, the courage, the endurance, and the promise as well as the uniqueness of the Black experience in America.

In breaking away from the traditional literary path of Black writers, Ellison became a liberator, freeing Black literature from American literary colonialism and bringing it to national and international independence. Ellison's liberating spirit is evident in such writers as McPherson, Ernest J. Gaines, Leon Forrest, and Clarence Major, and in the surrealism of Ishmael Reed, the folk tradition of Toni Morrison, the historical tradition exhibited by Gloria Naylor, and the spirituality of Toni Cade Bambara. These writers have developed alternative modes of expression or, as Ellison would say, they have realized new literary possibilities. They write not only about the Black experience in America but also about the American experience. While writing in the tradition of the great writers, Ellison blazed a literary trail for younger writers to follow. His innovative style was probably the first step in helping Black writers to break the literary constraints of the sociological tradition in African American letters. And, according to Mark Busby, Ellison has also had a “profound effect” on mainstream writers.

Ralph Ellison, more so than any other Black writer, brought change to the African American (and also to the American) literary canon because he refused to accept prescribed formulas for depicting the Black American. He brought a fierce reality to his vision that neither Blacks nor Caucasians were quite ready to accept. But his truth was/is so eminent, so palpable that neither race could deny it. Ellison will be remembered in literature and in life for making Blacks visible in a society where they had been invisible.[See also Bledsoe, Dr.; Mary Rambo; Norton, Mr.; Ras the Destroyer; Rinehart; Todd Clifton; Trueblood.]

Bibliography

• Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed., 1965.
• Therman B. O’Daniel, “The Image of Man As Protrayed by Ralph Ellison”, CLA Journal 10 (June 1967): 277–284.
• Addison Gayle, Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic, 1972.
• John Hersey, ed., Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1974.
• Robert G. O’Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison, 1980.
• John F. Callahan, “Chaos, Complexity, and Possibility: The Historical Frequencies of Ralph Waldo Ellison”, in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W. Benston, 1987, pp. 125–143.
• James Alan McPherson, “Invisible Man,” in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W. Benston, 1987, pp. 15–29.
• Jack Bishop, Ralph Ellison, 1988.
• Kerry Mc-Sweeney, Invisible Man: Race and Identity, 1988.
• Alan Nadel, Invisible Critics: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon, 1988.
• Mark Busby, Ralph Ellison, 1991.
• Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 1995.
• Maureen F. Curtin, “Materializing Invisibility as X-Ray Technology: Skin Matters in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man”, Literature, Interpretation, Theory 9:4 (April 1999): 281–311.
• Julia Eichelberger, Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison,
• Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty, 1999

Ralph Reckley, Sr.

American author Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) wrote "Invisible Man," a classic 20th-century American novel. He was an early spokesman among African-Americans for the need for racial identity.

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City on March 1, 1914. His father, a construction worker, died when Ellison was 3, and his mother stretched a meager income as a domestic worker to support her son. He studied music at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936. He worked on the New York City Federal Writers Project, contributed stories, reviews, and essays to New Masses, the Antioch Review, and other journals (these writings have not yet been collected); and in 1942 became editor of the Negro Quarterly. He met Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during these years; both had a major influence on his work, along with T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and the Russian novelists.

After brief duty in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, Ellison won a Rosenwald fellowship to work on the novel which brought him instant recognition and the National Book Award, Invisible Man (1952). The story of a young man's growing up, first in the South and then in Harlem, it is sensational, brutally honest, and graphic in the humiliating, often violent treatment the nameless hero suffers at the hands of the Southern white men who "educate" him and the Northern black men who "use" him. But Ellison reminds the reader that he "didn't select the surrealism, the distortion, the intensity as an experimental technique but because reality is surreal." When, at the end of the novel, the hero creeps into an empty Harlem cellar to escape from the world, it is only the last of his many bouts with "invisibility." The life of a African-American has always been relentlessly unreal, and his search for identity endless. But what Ellison's novel illuminates is the common plight of all human beings in the confrontations between dream and reality, light against darkness, idealism smothered by disillusion, injured psyche, adopted personae. In 1965, in a poll of 200 writers and critics, they voted Invisible Man the most distinguished novel published between 1945 and 1965 in America.

Ellison's Shadow and Act (1964) is a collection of 20 essays and 2 interviews. He contributed to The Living Novel (Granville Hicks, ed., 1957), The Angry Black (John A. Williams, ed., 1963), and Soon One Morning (Herbert Hill, ed., 1963) and to numerous literary journals. He lectured at the Salzburg Seminar in 1954; taught Russian and American literature at Bard College from 1958 to 1961; was visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1961 and visiting professor of writing at Rutgers University from 1962 to 1964; and in 1964, became visiting fellow in American studies at Yale University.

Ellison died on April 16, 1994, in New York City, leaving his second novel unfinished. His influence on American literature has been tremendous, and the loss of this second work is a bitter pill. According to Ellison himself, it was to be a work which would "[equal] his imaginative vision of the American novel as conqueror of the frontier and [answer] the Emersonian call for a literature to release all people from the bonds of oppression."

Further Reading

Perceptive critical comment on Ellison is available in Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (1958; rev. ed. 1965); Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1961); Marcus Klein, After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-century (1964); Jonathan Baumbach, The Landscape of Nightmare (1965); and Seymour L. Gross and John Edward Hardy, eds., Images of the Negro in American Literature (1966).

Ralph Ellsion, Invisible Man, Random House, 1982.

Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, Random House, 1964.

Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory, Random House, 1986.

Kimberly W. Benston, editor, The Black American Writer, Everett Edwards, 1969.

writer; social commentator; lecturer

Personal Information

Born Ralph Waldo Ellison, March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, OK; died of pancreatic cancer, April 16, 1994; son of Lewis (a construction laborer and entrepreneur) and Ida (maiden name, Millsap; a domestic and political activist) Ellison; married Fanny McConnell, 1946.
Education: Attended Tuskegee Institute, 1934-36.
Military/Wartime Service: Cook in U.S. Merchant Marines, WWII.

Career

Wrote first book review for New Challenge in 1937; worked for Federal Writers' Project and wrote for various publications, 1938-42; managing editor, Negro Quarterly, 1942; continued contributing book reviews and short stories to periodicals through mid-1940s; began work on novel, Invisible Man, 1945; Invisible Man published, 1952; lectured in Europe, 1954; resided in Rome, 1955-57; taught Russian and American literature at Bard College, 1958-61; visiting professor at University of Chicago and at Rutgers and Yale universities, early 1960s; Gertrude Whittall Lecturer, Library of Congress, and Ewing Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles, both 1964; fire at summer home in Plainsfield, MA, destroyed 350 text pages of unfinished novel, 1967; served as Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, 1970-80.

Life's Work

Lauded for his brilliance as a writer of modern fiction, Ralph Ellison has produced works that continue to have a profound impact on the understanding of race and social thought in the United States. His often surrealistic images reveal how people--despite their diverse geographic, racial, or social backgrounds--share a universal "common humanity." Ellison's early years as a classically trained musician and jazz trumpeter taught him to approach "the arts analytically."

When he sidelined music to take up writing in the late 1930s, he embarked upon a career that took him from obscurity to national fame. His 1952 novel Invisible Man is considered a masterpiece of modern literature and has been translated into fourteen languages around the world. A fiction writer, essayist, and educator, Ellison spent the last decades of his life at conferences and college campuses lecturing on the value of art and its ability to explore the complex relationships of the human experience.

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born to Lewis and Ida Millsap Ellison on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Although his home state practiced segregation, Ellison grew up without the oppressive conditions confronted by African Americans in the Deep South. Years later in his work Shadow and Act, Ellison recalled how he "felt no innate sense of inferiority" regarding his life goals and creative ambitions.

In Oklahoma City he was exposed to various elements within the black and white cultural worlds. While working as a domestic, Ellison's mother brought home popular magazines and recordings of opera that had been discarded by her employers. And in the public school system, Ellison learned the foundations of musical harmony and symphonic forms as well as the songs, stories, and dances of European folk culture. A great admirer of Oklahoma City's legendary jazz orchestra the Blue Devils, led by bassist Walter Page, Ellison befriended many of its members, including vocalist Jimmy Rushing, who would later become the singing great of Count Basie's Band. Ellison also attended Douglas School with legendary guitarist Charlie Christian, who astounded him with "sophisticated chords and progressions" played on a self-made instrument made from a cigar box.

Ellison's broad cultural experience inspired him to join several schoolmates in proclaiming themselves Renaissance Men- -individuals dedicated to transcending racial barriers through the study of art and thought. To fulfill this commitment, Ellison aspired to become a composer of symphonic music. In high school he took trumpet lessons from Dr. Ludwig Hebestreit, the founder and conductor of the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra. Hebestreit's instruction contributed to Ellison's understanding of the complex structure of high artistic forms.

Though music emerged as his primary means of expression, Ellison also enjoyed reading literature. In grade school, one of his teachers, Mrs. L. C. McFarland, introduced him to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and James Weldon Johnson. At home, Ellison read fairy tales, westerns, detective stories, and Harvard Classics. Outside on the streets and in the barber shops of Oklahoma City, African Americans introduced him to rural folk tales and legends of black cowboys, outlaws, and black Indian chiefs.

After graduating from high school, Ellison won a state sponsored scholarship to study music at Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama. In 1933, without funds for transportation, he hoboed by freight car to Tuskegee. Ellison's studies there included music appreciation, modern languages, physical education, and psychology. His three-hour- a-day trumpet practice sessions were heavily influenced by his music tutor, Hazel Harrison, one of Italian pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni's prize pupils and a friend of Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev.

Through Harrison, Ellison met famous Howard University professor, philosopher, and anthologist Alain Locke, who visited the Tuskegee campus in the mid-1930s. Meanwhile, Ellison's employment at the college library was affording him the chance to broaden his literary horizons; he read T. S. Eliot's Waste Land--a piece of poetry that, as he later explained in his book Going to the Territory, utilized "endless patterns of sounds" that resembled the improvisational approach of "the jazz experience." From the references of The Waste Land, Ellison learned of other great modernist writers. Soon he was reading the works of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway.

To earn money to finish his senior year of college, Ellison traveled to New York in the summer of 1936. On the day after his arrival, having taken a room at the Harlem Annex of the YMCA, he met up with Locke, who was accompanied by Langston Hughes. Locke introduced Ellison to Hughes; later Hughes asked Ellison to deliver two books--Andre Malraux's Man's Fate and Days of Wrath--to a friend. Following a suggestion by Hughes to read Malraux's works before returning them, Ellison found the writings an important source of inspiration that drew him closer to the world of literature.

Unable to raise the money to return to school, Ellison decided to remain in New York. He had originally intended to study sculpture during his stay in the city; unable to find an opening with Harlem artist Augusta Savage, he studied for one year with Richmond Barthe. Because the economic impact of the Great Depression limited his chance of finding work as a trumpeter, Ellison supported himself by taking jobs as a waiter, free-lance photographer, and file clerk. As his interest in sculpture waned, he returned to the study of music composition.

In the office of the Daily Worker on 135th Street in Harlem, Ellison met writer Richard Wright in 1937. After becoming engaged in a discussion about literature, Wright asked Ellison to write a book review of Walter Turpin's These Low Grounds for the first edition of the short-lived periodical New Challenge. "To one who had never attempted to write anything," stated Ellison in Going to the Territory, "this was the wildest of ideas." He penned his first short story, "Heine's Bull," for the 1937 winter issue of New Challenge. Not long afterward, Ellison became a regular contributor to the left- wing cultural periodical New Masses and to the Negro Quarterly.

Ellison's first works as a writer were influenced by Wright's harsh vision. The short stories "Slick Gonna Learn" (1939) and "The Birthmark" (1940) are examples of Ellison's use of brutal themes and violence. But Ellison soon broke from the literary naturalism of Wright and the Hemingway school. Instead of focusing entirely upon environmental forces, Ellison upheld faith in the inner strength of the individual to overcome the barriers and oppressive elements of his surroundings.

From 1938 to 1942 Ellison worked for the Federal Writers' Project. During this time he focused his literary themes on African American folklore and ethnic identity. In 1941 he published "Mister Toussan" for New Masses. After serving as managing editor for the Negro Quarterly, Ellison wrote two short stories in 1944, "Flying Home" and "King of the Bingo Game," which dealt with a young black man's attempt to control his destiny within the impersonal surroundings of a northern city. Within his early stories like "King of the Bingo Game," Ellison employed techniques of irony, gothicism, and macabre humor to describe realities hidden behind the surface of the black and white worlds.

Unable to join the U.S. Navy, Ellison enlisted in the Merchant Marine during World War II. He served as a cook and sailed with a naval convoy that supplied troops at the Battle of the Bulge. Around the same time, having secured a $1,500 grant from the Rosenwald Foundation, he wrote the story "In a Strange Country." Set in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, the tale describes a black fighter pilot's struggle as the highest- ranking officer among his fellow Allied prisoners.

Upon his return to New York, Ellison accepted an invitation to spend time on a friend's farm in Waitsfield, Vermont, where he conceived the idea for his novel Invisible Man. Ellison recalled in his book Going to the Territory how, one afternoon during his stay, he "wrote some words while sitting in an old barn looking out on the mountain.... 'I'm an Invisible Man.' I didn't quite know what it meant, or where the idea came from. But the moment I started to abandon it, I thought: 'Well maybe I should try to discover what lay behind the statement.'" After a long period of contemplation, Ellison built upon the meaning of the phrase and its relationship to the theme of alienation and self-definition.

Part autobiography and part surrealistic odyssey, Invisible Man incorporates numerous themes of the African American experience. Condemned to search for both acceptance and identity, the book's nameless protagonist crosses mysterious boundaries until he is awakened to the reality of his invisibility. As S. P. Fullinwider explained in his book The Mind and Mood of Black America, Ellison's novel not only describes "what it is like to be a Negro in America, but what it is like to be a modern man living in a society which fears man's inhumanity." Its use of blues, jazz, and African American folk culture--with political themes of so-called "Uncle Tom" conservatism, communism, and black nationalism in the tradition of Marcus Garvey--serve to, as Ellison stated in Going to the Territory, "take one below the level of racial structuring, and down into those areas where we are simply human beings."

Invisible Man is indebted to the literary contributions of poet-critic T. S. Eliot and American novelist William Faulkner. "It was Eliot," wrote Robert Bone, "who taught [Ellison] the value of the past which was both painful and precious, flinching neither from slavery nor incest nor prostitution nor chaos itself, to assimilate even his negative heritage, conquering it, transforming it into an asset, a weapon." From Faulkner, Ellison learned to draw upon grotesque scenes of southern rural life to illuminate the dark reality underneath American society.

But the two most profound influences on Ellison's work are Richard Wright's 1944 short story The Man Who Lived Underground and its predecessor, Notes from Underground, by nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. William Walling wrote in the literary journal Phylon that, by utilizing these two sources, Ellison "combined elements from Dostoevsky's classic dramatization of alienation in the west with the specifically American plight of Wright's black protagonist." The hero in Ellison's novel, driven underground by society, celebrates his anonymity by breaking from the "conformity" that made him invisible.

In 1953, a year following its publication, Invisible Man received the National Book Award for fiction, the Russwurm Award, and the Certificate of Award from the Chicago Defender. Upon winning the Rockefeller Foundation award in 1954, Ellison went on a lecture tour of Germany and appeared at a seminar in Salzburg, Austria. He then toured with the U.S. Information Service. And after receiving American Academy of Arts and Letters fellowships, he resided in Rome for two years.

Though Ellison never completed a second novel, he continued to work on a manuscript that he first began in 1955. Aside from publishing various essays and short stories, he concentrated primarily on lecturing about literature in universities throughout the country. Having returned from Rome in 1957, he taught Russian and American literature at Bard College from 1958 to 1961. In 1964 the Tuskegee Institute awarded him an honorary doctorate. That same year, he published Shadow and Act, a collection of sixteen essays, speeches, and interviews dealing with African American culture, literature, and music criticism. Written mainly for publication in magazines, the book's articles cover a time span from the late forties to the early sixties.

In 1965 the New York Herald Tribune's poll of 200 prominent authors, editors, and critics selected Invisible Man as "the most distinguishable single work published in the last twenty years." Shortly afterward, a fire at Ellison's summer home in Plainsfield, Massachusetts, destroyed almost 350 pages of the manuscript of his unfinished novel. Along with this serious setback, he faced increasing criticism from militant black writers and students who dismissed his commitment to civil rights issues and to the ongoing struggles of people of color in the United States.

But Ellison's determination and passion for literature kept him in the forefront of intellectual and academic circles. In 1969 President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor. From 1970 to 1980 Ellison served as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University. His second collection of essays and lectures, Going to the Territory, was published in 1986.

Few novels of postwar American fiction have been as celebrated, written about, and analyzed as Ellison's Invisible Man. Many critics contend that this author's ability to delve deeply into the chaotic and complex character of American society has rendered him a lasting figure in modern literature. Rooted in the great musical and literary traditions of African American and European cultures, Ellison's prose breaks from the earlier styles of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary naturalism of Richard Wright; his writings are filled with surrealistic, dream-like scenes that provide a view of the dark recesses of the human experience. "Art is the celebration of life," stated Ellison in Shadow and Act; it is, as he explained, a means of understanding the value of "diversity within unity," allowing us to explore the full range of humanity.

Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994. Joe Fox, his editor at Random House, was quoted as saying in Time that the author's novel-in-progress was "virtually finished," but the book's title and subject were never divulged during their meetings. Still, with the praise and critical attention already bestowed upon his published work, there is little doubt that his universalist message will endure long after the close of the twentieth century.

Awards

National Book Award and Russwurm Award, both 1953, for Invisible Man; Rockefeller Foundation Award, 1954; American Academy of Arts and Letters fellow, 1955-57; Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1969; named chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres (France), 1969; National Medal of Arts, 1985; more than a dozen honorary degrees.

Works

Writings

• Books
• Invisible Man (novel), Signet, 1952.
• Shadow and Act (essays, interviews, and lectures), Random House, 1964.
• Going to the Territory (essays, interviews, and lectures), Vintage Books, 1986.
• Short stories
• "Heine's Bull," 1937.
• "Slick Gonna Learn," 1939.
• "The Birthmark," New Masses, 1940.
• "Mister Toussan," New Masses, 1941.
• "Flying Home," Cross-section, 1944.
• "King of the Bingo Game," Tomorrow, 1944.
• "In a Strange Country," Tomorrow, 1944.
• "Did You Ever Dream Lucky?," New World Writing, 1954.
• "A Coupla Scalped Indians," New World Writing, 1956.
• "And Hickman Arrives," 1960.
• "The Roof, the Steeple, and the People," 1960.
• "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar," 1963.
• "Tell It Like It Is Baby," 1965.
• "Cadillac Flambe," 1973.

Further Reading

Books

• Bishop, Jack, Ralph Ellison, Chelsea House, 1988.
• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Bone, Robert, The Negro Novel in America, Yale University Press, 1968.
• Busby, Mark, Ralph Ellison, Twayne, 1991.
• Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, edited by James A.
• Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross, New York Free Press, 1958.
• Fullinwider, S. P., The Mind and Mood of Black America: Twentieth-Century Thought, Dorsey, 1969.
• McSweeney, Kerry, Invisible Man: Race and Identity, Twayne, 1988.
• Nadel, Alan, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon, University of Iowa Press, 1988.
• O'Meally, Robert G., The Craft of Ellison, Harvard University Press, 1980.
• Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John Hersey, Prentice Hall, 1974.

Periodicals

• Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1992, p. 1.
• Commentary, June 1952.
• Esquire, July 1986, p. 98.
• Iowa Review, Fall 1989, pp. 1-10.
• Jet, May 2, 1994, pp. 54-55.
• New York Times Book Review, April 13, 1952, p. 5.
• Phylon, June 1973, pp. 120-34.
• Time, April 25, 1994, p. 90.

Other

• Associated Press release, April 16, 1994.

— John Cohassey

For more information on Ralph Waldo Ellison, visit Britannica.com.

(1914-1994), essayist and novelist. As a cultural historian and novelist, Ellison has had since 1952 an extraordinary influence on European-American and African-American literature. Born and raised in Oklahoma and trained at Tuskegee Institute as a symphony composer, Ellison has successfully managed to reconcile his folk and classical cultural heritages. Before a fateful Harlem meeting with Richard Wright in 1937, he had already been educated in the rich oral ethnic forms of his region. Besides the rhythms, imagery, and poetry of the vernacular, Oklahoma City, a southwestern center of jazz, was vibrant with the blues during his boyhood. But in school, young trumpet-playing Ellison was also drilled in military and classical music.

Ellison realized his boyhood dream of becoming a renaissance man. He has been a free-lance photographer, jazz musician, vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a member of the American Academy of Arts, a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and a professor at New York University. He has received such prestigious awards as the Russwurm, the Medal of Freedom, and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres.

He peppered his conversations, lectures, and writings with anecdotes that revealed his humble origins, professional relationships with celebrated, culturally diverse artists, and a strong sense of bicultural rather than black cultural nationalist identity as an American writer of African descent. More highly respected by his peers than by younger black students and writers, Ellison was as much at home in a Harlem barbershop as in a Harvard lecture hall.

In synthesizing the best conventions of his bicultural heritage, Ellison was inspired by Eliot's The Waste Land. It was Wright, however, who discussed the art of fiction with the young college dropout and guided him to Conrad, James, and Dostoyevsky; Wright who introduced him to Leadbelly and Marxism in the same evening; and Wright who acted as midwife for his first publication. Subsequently, on the strength of a single novel, a couple of collections of essays, and nearly two dozen stories, Ellison won acclaim as a major American author and influenced the assumptions and methodologies of contemporary critical theories of African-American literature.

The superb integration of surrealism and folklore in his best short stories, "Flying Home" and "King of the Bingo Game," anticipate the irony and parody of his epic novel Invisible Man (1952). In a poll by Book Week, it was judged "the most distinguished single work" published in America between 1945 and 1965. Its complex time structure, spacious setting, nameless ethnic protagonist, allegorical and legendary characters, rites of passage, ironic theme, and ritualistic use of music and language suggest that Ellison drew on African-American folklore and the Western epic tradition to render his vision of the historical odyssey of blacks in America to define themselves. Eight excerpts from a second novel that Ellison began in 1953 have been published in journals; the best of these is "And Hickman Arrives."

The most significant essays in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), which sparkle with the same wry wit and wisdom, are essentially cultural and autobiographical. These pieces celebrate Ellison's efforts to reconcile his double consciousness by drawing on his indigenous ethnic culture for standards, role models, and rites of passage. The essays have three general themes: African-American music, the complex relationships of folklore to literature, and those between African-American and European-American cultures. Convinced "that the most authoritative rendering of America in music is that of American Negroes," Ellison argues that the music is a unique blend of European and African cultural expression. And his argument in Shadow and Act that the possibilities for formal literature are infinite for writers who draw on the techniques and spirit of the slave songs, blues, jazz, and black vernacular has had a profound influence on critical studies of African-American literature. Shadow and Act, like Invisible Man, has become a standard college text.

Bibliography:

Kimberly W. Benston, ed., Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison (1987); Robert G. O'Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980).

Author:

Bernard W. Bell

See also Literature; Wright, Richard.

(Ralph Waldo Ellison), 1914–94, African-American author, b. Oklahoma City, Okla.; studied Tuskegee Inst. (now Tuskegee Univ.). Originally a trumpet player and aspiring composer, he moved (1936) to New York City, where he met Langston Hughes, who became his mentor, and became friends with Richard Wright, who radicalized his thinking. Ellison's earliest published writings were reviews and stories in the politically radical New Masses magazine. His literary reputation rests almost completely on one novel, Invisible Man (1952). A classic of American literature, it draws upon the author's experiences to detail the harrowing progress of a nameless young black man struggling to live in a hostile society. Ellison also published two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). His collected essays were published in 1995, and a volume of stories appeared in 1996. For many years Ellison struggled with the writing of a second novel, sections of which appeared (1960–77) in magazines, but it was still uncompleted at his death. Condensing the sprawling mass of text and notes written over four decades, his literary executor assembled the novel Juneteenth, which was published in 1999.

Bibliography

See R. G. O'Meally, ed., Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (2001); biographies by L. Jackson (2002) and A. Rampersad (2007); studies by J. Hersey, ed. (1974), R. G. O'Meally (1980), A. Nadel (1988), M. Busby (1991), E. Schor (1993), J. G. Watts (1995), H, Bytkerm ed, (2000), H. Bloom, ed. (2003), K. W. Warren (2003), S. C. Tracy, ed. (2004), and J. S. Wright (2006).

(1914-1994)

1952	Invisible Man. Ellison's remarkable novel debut presents a nameless black protagonist's quest for identity, from his high school graduation through college and in Harlem in a series of surrealistic scenes. With a rich verbal texture, the novel incorporates vernacular elements from black folklore and music as well as modernist techniques derived from James Joyce, William Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot. The novel wins the National Book Award and is considered one of the most ambitious fictional treatments of the African American experience, as well as one of the greatest postwar American novels. Ellison would spend the rest of his life wrestling with his unfinished second novel, posthumously assembled from draft material by John F. Callahan as Juneteenth, in 1999.
1964	Shadow and Act. Ellison's collection of essays, reviews, and interviews deals with, in its author's words, "literature and folklore, with Negro musical expression--especially jazz and the blues--and with the complex relationship between the Negro American subculture and North American culture as a whole." In it, Ellison answers critic Irving Howe on the responsibility of the black writer, contests the nature of black folklore presented by Stanley Edgar Hyman, and criticizes LeRoi Jones on his interpretation of the blues.
1986	Going to the Territory. Ellison's second collection of essays, reviews, speeches, and interviews treats figures such as Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, and Duke Ellington while considering the question of American democracy and identity. His Collected Essays would be issued in 1995.
1996	Flying Home. A collection of Ellison's short fiction appears posthumously, including early pieces that foreshadow the writer's classic American novel, Invisible Man.
1999	Juneteenth. Ellison's long-awaited second novel becomes a controversial literary event. Ellison had published parts of the novel over the years, and the mystique about its scope and subject matter grew, especially after it became known that a fire had destroyed the principal draft and Ellison had to begin anew, almost from scratch. The novel features Hickman, a black minister, who brings up a boy who looks white. Later the boy runs away and becomes a racist U.S. senator. The events that prompt this denouement are gradually revealed in the conversation between the minister and the senator.

Quotes:

"I am an invisible man. 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."

"If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy."

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