Ralph Ellison | |
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 Ellison in 1961 | |
| Born | Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913-03-01)March 1, 1913 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Died | April 16, 1994(1994-04-16) (aged 81) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Education | Tuskegee University |
| Genre | Essay, criticism, novel, short story |
| Notable works | Invisible Man (1952) |
| Notable awards |
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Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913[a] – April 16, 1994) was an American writer,literary critic, and scholar best known for his novelInvisible Man, which won theNational Book Award in 1953.[2]
Ellison wroteShadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, andGoing to the Territory (1986).[3]The New York Times dubbed him "among the gods of America's literaryParnassus".[4]
A posthumous novel,Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes Ellison left upon his death.[5]
Ralph Waldo Ellison, named afterRalph Waldo Emerson,[6] was born inOklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap, on March 1, 1913. He was the second of three sons; firstborn Alfred died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice (or Millsap) was born in 1916.[1] Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died in 1916, after work-related injury and a failed operation.[6][7] The elder Ellison loved literature, and doted on his children. Ralph later discovered, as an adult, that his father had hoped he would grow up to be a poet.
In 1921, Ellison's mother and her children moved toGary, Indiana, where she had a brother.[8] According to Ellison, his mother felt that "my brother and I would have a better chance of reaching manhood if we grew up in the north." When she did not find a job and her brother lost his, the family returned to Oklahoma, where Ellison worked as a busboy, a shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, and a dentist's assistant.[8] From the father of a neighborhood friend, he received free lessons for playing trumpet and alto saxophone, and would go on to become the school bandmaster.[8]
Ida remarried three times after Lewis died.[b] However, the family life was precarious, and Ralph worked various jobs during his youth and teens to assist with family support. While attendingDouglass High School, he also found time to play on the school's football team.[7] He graduated from high school in 1931. He worked for a year, and found the money to make a down payment on a trumpet, using it to play with local musicians, and to take further music lessons. At Douglass, he was influenced by principalInman E. Page and his daughter, music teacherZelia N. Breaux.[7]
Ellison applied twice for admission toTuskegee Institute, the prestigiousall-black university in Alabama founded byBooker T. Washington.[8] He was finally admitted in 1933 for lack of a trumpet player in its orchestra.[8] Ellison hopped freight trains to get to Alabama, and was soon to find out that the institution was no less class-conscious than white institutions generally were.[8]
Ellison's outsider position at Tuskegee "sharpened his satirical lens," criticHilton Als believes: "Standing apart from the university's air of sanctimonious Negritude enabled him to write about it." In passages ofInvisible Man, "he looks back with scorn and despair on the snivelling ethos that ruled at Tuskegee."[8]
Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school,[9] headed by composerWilliam L. Dawson. Ellison also was guided by the department's piano instructor,Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent his free time in the library with modernist classics. He cited readingT. S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land as a major awakening moment.[10] In 1934, he began to work as a desk clerk at the university library, where he readJames Joyce andGertrude Stein. Librarian Walter Bowie Williams enthusiastically let Ellison share in his knowledge.[8]
A major influence upon Ellison was English teacher Morteza Drexel Sprague, to whom Ellison later dedicated his essay collectionShadow and Act. He opened Ellison's eyes to "the possibilities of literature as a living art" and to "the glamour he would always associate with the literary life."[8] Through Sprague, Ellison became familiar withFyodor Dostoevsky'sCrime and Punishment andThomas Hardy'sJude the Obscure, identifying with the "brilliant, tortured anti-heroes" of those works.[8]
As a child, Ellison evidenced what would become a lifelong interest in audio technology, starting by taking apart and rebuilding radios, and later moving on to constructing and customizing elaboratehi-fi stereo systems as an adult. He discussed this passion in a December 1955 essay, "Living With Music", inHigh Fidelity magazine.[11] Ellison scholar John S. Wright contends that this deftness with the ins-and-outs of electronic devices went on to inform Ellison's approach to writing and the novel form.[12] Ellison remained at Tuskegee until 1936, and decided to leave before completing the requirements for a degree.[7]
Desiring to study sculpture, he moved toNew York City on July 5, 1936, and found lodging at aYMCA on 135th Street inHarlem, then "the culture capital of black America".[8] He metLangston Hughes, "Harlem's unofficial diplomat" of the Depression era, and someone—as one of the country's celebrity black authors—who could live from his writing.[8] Hughes introduced him to the black literary establishment with Communist sympathies.[8]
Ellison met several artists who would influence his later life, including the artistRomare Bearden and the authorRichard Wright (with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship). After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged him to write fiction as a career. Ellison's first published story was "Hymie's Bull", inspired by his 1933hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, Ellison had more than 20 book reviews, as well as short stories and articles, published in magazines such asNew Challenge andThe New Masses.
Ellison was also influenced to experiment with photography through his friendship with photographerGordon Parks. The two collaborated on a photo essay in 1948, "Harlem is Nowhere",[13][14] on the first racially integrated psychiatric clinic called Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, along with other photography projects over the years. Ellison's essay "The Pictorial Problem" was meant to be a manifesto of how images could psychologically impact the viewer. While working with Gordon Parks, Ellison was an inspiration to Gordon on creating impactful photographs. Ellison's essay would later become a guiding principle for Parks's photography.[15][16]
Wright was then openly associated with theCommunist Party, and Ellison was publishing and editing for communist publications, although his "affiliation was quieter", according to historian Carol Polsgrove inDivided Minds.[17] Both Wright and Ellison lost their faith in the Communist Party during World War II, when they felt the party had betrayed African Americans and replacedMarxist class politics with social reformism. In a letter to Wright, dated August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with thebourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. ... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." In the wake of this disillusion, Ellison began writingInvisible Man, a novel that was, in part, his response to the party's betrayal.[17]: 66–69
In 1938, Ellison met Rose Araminta Poindexter, a woman two years his senior.[c] She was an actress, starring in films such asThe Upright Sinner (1931). Poindexter and Ellison were married in late 1938. Poindexter continued her career as a stage actress after their marriage. In biographerArnold Rampersad's assessment of Ellison's taste in women, he was searching for one "physically attractive and smart who would love, honor, and obey him—but not challenge his intellect."[8] At first they lived at 312 West 122nd Street, Rose's apartment, but moved to 453 West 140th Street after her income shrank.[8] In 1941, he briefly had an affair withSanora Babb, which he confessed to his wife afterwards, and in 1943 the marriage was over.[8] The couple officially divorced in 1945. As of April 2023, Poindexter remains alive at 111 years old.[citation needed]
At the start of World War II, Ellison was classed1A by the localSelective Service System,[7] and thus eligible for the draft. However, he was not drafted. Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in theUnited States Merchant Marine.[17]: 67 In 1946, he married Fanny McConnell, an accomplished person in her own right: a scholarship graduate of theUniversity of Iowa who was a founder of theNegro People's Theater in Chicago and a writer forThe Chicago Defender.[18] While he wroteInvisible Man, she helped support Ellison financially by working for American Medical Center for Burma Frontiers (the charity supportingGordon S. Seagrave's medical missionary work[18]). In 1946, Ellison composed and wrote the lyrics for at least two songs, "Flirty" and "It Would Only Hurt Me If I Knew".[19] From 1947 to 1951, he earned some money writing book reviews but spent most of his time working onInvisible Man. Fanny also helped type Ellison's longhand text[18] and assisted him in editing the typescript as it progressed.[20]
Published in 1952,Invisible Man explores the theme of a person's search for their identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African-American man, first in the Deep South and then in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright andJames Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel also contains taboo issues such asincest and the controversial subject ofcommunism.
In 1962, the futuristHerman Kahn recruited Ellison as a consultant to theHudson Institute in an attempt to broaden its scope beyond defense-related research.[21]
In 1964, Ellison publishedShadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach atBard College,Rutgers University andYale University, while continuing to work on his novel. The following year, a Book Week poll of 200 critics, authors, and editors was released that proclaimedInvisible Man the most important novel since World War II.[22]
In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his summer home inPlainfield, Massachusetts, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award forInvisible Man that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel" and, despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book.[23] Ellison ultimately wrote more than 2,000 pages of this second novel but never finished it.[24]
Ellison died on April 16, 1994, ofpancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt atTrinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum[25] in theHamilton Heights neighborhood ofUpper Manhattan.
| External videos | |
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 Panel discussion on the writings of Ralph Ellison, December 5, 1996,C-SPAN |
Invisible Man won the 1953 USNational Book Award for Fiction.[2]
The award was his ticket into the American literary establishment. He eventually was admitted to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, received two President's Medals (fromLyndon Johnson andRonald Reagan) and a State Medal from France. He was the first African-American admitted to theCentury Association[26] and was awarded an honorary Doctorate fromHarvard University. Disillusioned by his experience with the Communist Party, he used his new fame to speak out for literature as a moral instrument.[17]: 70–72 In 1955 he traveled to Europe, visiting and lecturing, settling for a time in Rome, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a 1957Bantam anthology calledA New Southern Harvest.Robert Penn Warren was in Rome during the same period, and the two writers became close friends.[27] Later, Warren would interview Ellison about his thoughts on race, history, and theCivil Rights Movement for his bookWho Speaks for the Negro?[28] In 1958, Ellison returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature atBard College and to begin a second novel,Juneteenth. During the 1950s, he corresponded with his lifelong friend, the writerAlbert Murray. In their letters they commented on the development of their careers, theCivil Rights Movement, and other common interests including jazz. Much of this material was published in the collectionTrading Twelves (2000).
Writing essays about both the black experience and his love forjazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969, he received thePresidential Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of theOrdre des Arts et des Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty atNew York University as theAlbert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, serving from 1970 to 1980.
In 1975, Ellison was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received theNew York City College'sLangston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded theNational Medal of Arts.[29][30] In 1986, hisGoing to the Territory was published; this is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelistWilliam Faulkner and Ellison's friend Richard Wright, as well as the music ofDuke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.[31]
In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from theAnisfield-Wolf Book Awards; his artistic achievements included work as a sculptor, musician, photographer, and college professor as well as his writing output. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, theUniversity of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of theFellowship of Southern Writers.
After Ellison's death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication ofFlying Home and Other Stories in 1996. In 1999, his second novel,Juneteenth, was published under the editorship ofJohn F. Callahan, a professor atLewis & Clark College and Ellison'sliterary executor. It was a 368-page condensation of more than 2,000 pages written by Ellison over a period of 40 years.[32] All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively on January 26, 2010, byModern Library, under the titleThree Days Before the Shooting...[33]
On February 18, 2014, theUSPS issued a 91¢ stamp honoring Ralph Ellison in its Literary Arts series.[34][35]
A park on 150th Street andRiverside Drive in Harlem (near 730 Riverside Drive, Ellison's principal residence from the early 1950s until his death) was dedicated to Ellison on May 1, 2003. In the park stands a 15 by 8-foot bronze slab with a "cut-out man figure" inspired by his bookInvisible Man.[36]
