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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 QuarterlyInvisible Man. , 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, 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.

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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.