Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1913. Named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, he grew up in a family marked by loss, work, music, and books. His father, Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and construction foreman, died in 1916 after a work-related injury and a failed operation. Only later did Ellison learn that his father had hoped he would become a poet. His mother, Ida Millsap, moved the family to Gary, Indiana, in 1921, believing her sons would have a better chance of reaching manhood in the North, but the family returned to Oklahoma when work did not come through.

Ellison’s youth was practical and restless. He worked as a busboy, shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, and dentist’s assistant to help support the family. At Douglass High School, he played football and developed as a musician, receiving free lessons in trumpet and alto saxophone from the father of a neighborhood friend. He graduated in 1931, worked for a year, bought a trumpet with a down payment, played with local musicians, and continued lessons. Two figures at Douglass, principal Inman E. Page and music teacher Zelia N. Breaux, helped shape his early discipline and ambition.

In 1933, Ellison entered Tuskegee Institute in Alabama after applying twice, admitted because the orchestra needed a trumpet player. He traveled there by hopping freight trains. At Tuskegee he studied music, but the library became just as important to him. As a desk clerk at the university library, he read T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. He later described reading Eliot’s The Waste Land as a major awakening moment. English teacher Morteza Drexel Sprague opened his eyes to literature as a living art and introduced him to works by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Thomas Hardy. Ellison left Tuskegee in 1936 before completing a degree.

Ellison moved to New York City on July 5, 1936, hoping to study sculpture, and found lodging at a YMCA on 135th Street in Harlem, then described as the culture capital of black America. There he met Langston Hughes, who introduced him to black literary circles with Communist sympathies. He also met Romare Bearden and Richard Wright. After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged him to write fiction. Ellison’s first published story, “Hymie’s Bull,” drew on his 1933 experience hoboing by train to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, he published more than 20 book reviews, along with stories and articles, in magazines including New Challenge and The New Masses.

Ellison is best known for Invisible Man, the novel that won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act, a 1964 collection of political, social, and critical essays, and Going to the Territory in 1986. His interests reached beyond fiction: he wrote on music, loved audio technology from childhood, built and customized hi-fi stereo systems, and worked with Gordon Parks on photography projects, including the 1948 photo essay “Harlem is Nowhere.” After Ellison’s death on April 16, 1994, the novel Juneteenth was assembled from the many notes he left behind. His words continue to matter because they grew from lived work, wide reading, music, argument, doubt, and a sharp eye for American life.