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Ralph Waldo Ellison
was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in March of 1914.
Lewis Ellison, his father, named him after
American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lewis died while
Ralph was still a boy, leaving Ellison's mother, Ida Ellison, to support
herself and her children by working as a housekeeper. Ida, a
headstrong woman, believed in Socialism and was arrested several times
for violating the segregation orders.
While
growing up, Ellison had an ear for jazz and learned to play the trumpet.
Among his friends were the blues singer Jimmy Rushing and trumpeter Hot
Lips Page. With a music scholarship, Ellison was able to attend Tuskegee
Institute from 1933 to 1936. His intentions were to pursue a career in
music, but jazz music was considered primitive and not to the liking of
the conservative Tuskegee Institute. At this time, he also began
reading more literature and grew interested in pursuing a writing career
instead.
In 1936, he changed course, and moved to New York
City where met novelist Richard Wright, and poet Langston Hughes. He
joined the
Federal
Writers' Project, and with the encouragment of Wright and Hughes, he
published short stories and articles in such magazines as New
Challenge and New Masses.
He became an editor of the Negro
Quarterly , but had to serve in World War II from 1943 to 1945 as a
cook in the Merchant Marines. Soon after the war ended, he married
Fanny McConnell, and wrote the first line of Invisible
Man.
Invisible Man, published in 1952, brought him international
recognition. The novel was his attempt to set straight the myth of the
great frontier tradition—that the United States was a land of "infinite
possibilities." He drew from his experiences and those within his
close-knit black community in Oklahoma. This, combined with his
background in music, created a richly rhythmical and symbolic language
in his writing. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in
1953.
He went on to published two collections of
essays,
Shadow and Act in 1964 and
Going to the Territory (Vintage International), published in
1986. He lectured at various American colleges and universities,
including Bard, Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, Chicago, and New York
University, where in 1970 he became the Albert Schweitzer professor in
the Humanities.
Among Ellison's several awards are the
Medal of Freedom (1969), Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et Lettres
(1970). He received a fellowship to the National American Academy of
Arts and Letters in Rome (1955-57), and was elected a vice-president of
the American P.E.N. (1964), and a vice-president of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters (1967). Ellison received in 1985 National
Medal of Arts for Invisible Man and for his teaching at numerous
universities.
Ellison's second novel,
Juneteenth : A Novel was planned as a trilogy, but was left
unfinished at his death. It was published in 1999. Among Ellison's
anthologized short stories are
Flying Home : and Other Stories'and 'King of the Bingo Game'.
Ellison died in New York on April of 1994 of pancreatic cancer.
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