Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison is a 2-Time AALBC.com Bestselling Author
Ralph Ellison was Voted the #17 Favorite Author of the 20th Century
Biography of Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison, born March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, OK; died of cancer, April 16, 1994, in New York, NY; son of Lewis Alfred (a construction worker and tradesman) and Ida (Millsap) Ellison; married Fanny McConnell, July, 1946.
Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after the
preacher-philosopher Emerson, was born in Oklahoma in 1914.
His father [Lewis Alfred (a construction worker and tradesman)]
died when he was three years old, and he was brought up by his
mother, who worked as domestic help in white households in order
to support herself and her two sons.
At the age of nineteen, he won a scholarship to study music at
the Booker T. Washington Tuskegee Institute. In 1936, he went to
New York and there met the black writers Langston Hughes and
Richard Wright. He started contributing to the Federal Writers’
Project, set up as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and soon his
short stories and articles began to appear in magazines and
journals. In 1943 he joined the United States Merchant Marines
returning to New York after the war. Awarded a Rosenwald
fellowship he was able to concentrate on his writing and, seven
years after starting it, his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952)
was published. Immediately recognized as a classic in its own
time, and described as a "touchstone of the 1950s", it won the
American National Book Award and established Ellison as one of
the major figures of twentieth-century fiction. He also
published two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and
Going to the Territory (1986), but his second novel, which he
worked on for over four decades and repeatedly declared to be
’virtually finished’, never appeared. Flying Home and Other
Stories (Penguin 1996) is a collection of both published and
previously unpublished short stories.
Ellison was highly regarded by both the literary and academic
worlds. He was Fellow of the American Academy in Rome from 1955
to 1957 and on his return held several visiting professorships;
latterly being Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at
New York University. He received the United States Medal of
Freedom in 1969, became Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres
in 1970, and received the National Medal of Arts in 1985. Ralph
Ellison died in 1994 [of cancer, April 16, 1994], survived by
his wife of forty-eight years [married Fanny McConnell, July,
1946]. In his obituary, The Independent declared him "a great
gentleman, indeed a noble man, and the remarkable mythologising
author of… the great American Negro novel."
“No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe;
nor am i one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to posses a mind.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.
When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.”
—Ralph Ellison
Are you the author profiled here? Email us your official website or Let us host your primary web presence.
