Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City on the first of March 1913, three years after Oklahoma statehood. He studied music at the Tuskegee Institute under William L. Dawson and moved to New York in 1936 to study sculpture, met Richard Wright through the Federal Writers' Project, and was apprenticed to Wright in the late 1930s through the political and literary New York of the early Popular Front.

His single published novel, Invisible Man (1952), is one of the most consequential works of twentieth-century American fiction. The novel — narrated by an unnamed Black protagonist who passes through a Southern Black college, a Harlem political organization based on the Communist Party, and a series of racial confrontations across the American interior — established the technical and rhetorical possibilities of the Black-American Bildungsroman. It received the National Book Award in 1953, was named in a 1965 Book Week poll the most distinguished American novel of the post-war period by the largest margin of any single work, and has been continuously in print for seventy years.

His essay collections — Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) — engaged Black-American letters, jazz, and American national identity with a sustained intellectual confidence rare in mid-century American criticism.

He worked for forty-two years on a second novel that he never completed. The unfinished manuscript, edited by his literary executor John F. Callahan, was published posthumously as Juneteenth (1999) and in fuller form as Three Days Before the Shooting (2010).

He died in New York on the sixteenth of April 1994, age eighty.

He is honored here as the novelist whose single book reset the technical possibilities of the American novel.