Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City on the first of March, 1913, three years after Oklahoma statehood, and named by his parents, Lewis and Ida Ellison, for the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father died when Ralph was a small boy, and his mother sustained the family through her labor. A child of the young frontier state, he took up the cornet at eight and dreamed of composing symphonies.

In 1933 he entered the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he studied music under the composer William L. Dawson and read widely in modern literature. In 1936 he traveled to New York — intending to study sculpture — but there he met Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, and the pull of the written word turned him toward fiction, criticism, and the essay.

After years of apprenticeship, Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952. Its nameless narrator, moving through a nation that refused to see him, gave American letters a new voice, and the novel won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison followed it with the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), teaching and lecturing across the decades.

He died in New York on the sixteenth of April, 1994, his long-awaited second novel still unfinished; it was later assembled and published as Juneteenth. Ralph Ellison reset the possibilities of the American novel, and in naming what a nation would not see, he made himself, and his people, unforgettable.