Ralph Ellison Biography and List of Works

African-American writer, teacher, who's novel THE INVISIBLE MAN (1952) gained a wide critical success. Ellison has been compared to such writers as Melville and Hawthorne. He has used racial issues to express universal dilemmas but avoided to write works of overt social consciousness and radical protest. Many artists of the Black Arts movement rejected Ellison for his insistence that America be a land of cultural exchange and synergy. Talented in many fields, Ellison also was an accomplished jazz trumpeter and a free-lance photographer.

"I am an invisible man... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
(from The Invisible Man, prologue)

Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Three years after his birth his father died, and Ellison's mother supported herself and her children by working as a domestic. While growing up, he began performing on the trumpet during high school years. After music studies at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (1933-1936), he dropped out to pursue a career in the visual arts. He moved to New York City - there a change meetings with Langston Hughes and Richard Wright led him to join Federal Writers' Project. Encouraged by the author Richard Wright he started to write essays, reviews and short stories for various periodicals. Ellison's stories appeared in New Masses and other periodicals. He became an editor of the Negro Quarterly and started to work on his first novel.

During WW II Ellison served in the Merchant Marines. After his famous novel Invisible Man, Ellison published two collections of essays. He lectured widely at various American colleges and universities, including Bard, Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, Chicago, and New York University, where he was 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.

Invisible Man (1952) tells a story of an Afro-American man, who is losing his sense of identity in a world of prejudice and hostility. His experiences take him from the South to the North, in an underground cellar to solve his relationship with American society. Before he sees the light, the nameless narrator makes his journey from illusion to insight, offering on the same time a symbolic recapitulation of Afro-American history. Quotations and allusions to Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass provide material for the narrator's tale, but Ellison's also owes a great debt to W.E.B DuBois' concept of double consciousness. Beginning with the prologue's theme song, 'What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue', Ellison suggests that jazz might represent the ideal for a harmonic blending of influences in American culture. The book was rewarded with National Book Award in 1953. It was considered in 1965 in an inquiry of 200 authors and critics among the most important works after World War II. - Ellison insisted that he wrote Invisible Man thinking not of its sociological insights into injustice, but strictly of the art of writing. He was deeply interested in the works of Russian authors, with the most obvious influence being Feodor Dostoevskii's Notes from the Underground, and its parallel 'The Man Who Lived Underground' by Richard Wright. But unlike Dostoevskii's protagonist, Ellison's hero is not ready to yield and retire, his hibernation is only temporary.

Ellison's second novel, JUNETEENTH (1999), was planned as a trilogy, but was left unfinished at his death. He published two collections of essays, SHADOW AND ACT (1964) and GOING TO THE TERRITORY (1986). In Shadow and Act Ellison stated that 'one of the obligations I took when I committed myself to the art and form of the novel was that of striving for the broadest range, the discovery and articulation of the most exalted values.' Among Ellison's short stories are Flying Home, King of the Bingo Game, and A Coupla Scalped Indians. Ellison died in New York on April 16, 1994. The posthumously published Juneteenth focused on two opposite characters: Adam Sunraider, a white, bigoted New England senator, and Alonzo "Daddy" Hickman, a black Baptist minister. They turn out to have a paternal relationship. When Sunraider is shot, he summons Hickman to his bedside, which starts an exploration of their shared past. Ellison spent years reconstructing the novel, after a large section of the manuscript burned in 1967. Ellison's manuscript, some 2,000 pages, was edited by John Callahan.

For further reading: Twentieth Century Interpretations of Invisible Man, ed. by J.M. Reilly (1970); Studies in "Invisible Man", ed. by R. Gottesman (1971); A Casebook on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, ed. by Joseph A Trimmer (1972); A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by John Hersey (1974); The Blinking Eye by Jacqueline Covo (1974); "Invisible Man"'s Literary Heritage by V. Gray (1978); The Craft of Ralph Ellison by G.O. Meally (1980); Ralph Ellison: The Genesis of an Artist by Rudolf F. Dietze (1982); Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. by Kimberly W. Benston (1987); Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon by Alan Nadel (1988); Approaches to Teaching Ellison's Invisible Man, ed. by Pancho Savery (1989); Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life by Jerry Gafio Watts (1994); Conversations with Ralph Ellison, ed. by Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (1995); On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley by Gregory Stephens (1999); Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty by Julia Eichelberger (1999)

INVISIBLE MAN, (1952)