Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994), American author and educator, one of the most influential black American writers of the 20th century. Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and educated at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). His best-known work, Invisible Man (1952), expounds the theme that American society willfully ignores blacks. The novel is the account of an unnamed young Southern black man’s journey from innocence to experience as he searches, first in the South and then in the North, for his place in the world. Ellison uses rich, varied, and powerful language to portray the black experience in all its vitality and complexity. The novel was one of the first works to describe modern racial problems in the United States from a black American point of view. It received the National Book Award for fiction in 1953.

In his essay collections Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), Ellison addressed various aspects of American culture. He is also noted for many magazine articles and short stories, and during his career he lectured at many colleges and universities on the subject of the black American. From 1970 to 1979 Ellison was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, and in 1985 he was one of the first recipients of the National Medal of Arts. In 1995 The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison was published. The following year several of his unpublished stories were discovered by John F. Callahan, his literary executor. Two of them, “Boy on a Train” and “I Did Not Learn Their Names,” appeared in The New Yorker magazine later in 1996. Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), a collection of Ellison’s stories written between 1937 and 1954, includes six previously unpublished pieces. At his death his long-awaited second novel, delayed in part by the destruction of hundreds of pages in a 1967 fire, was left uncompleted. A heavily edited version of this novel, Juneteenth, was published in 1999.