Ralph Ellison

His father named him for Ralph Waldo Emerson, ran a small construction business in Oklahoma City, and died in 1916 of complications from a work injury when Ralph was not yet three. His mother remarried three times, and the boy worked as a busboy, shoeshine boy and dentist's assistant while a neighbor gave him free lessons on trumpet and saxophone. He was rejected once by Tuskegee Institute and admitted on the second try, mainly because the school orchestra needed a trumpet player, and hopped freight trains to get there in 1933. He read Eliot, Joyce and Stein in the library rather than practicing music, left before finishing his degree in 1936, and moved to New York, where Langston Hughes and Richard Wright pushed him toward fiction.

Wright's encouragement mattered, but it was his own disillusionment that produced the book: Ellison had been sympathetic to Communist Party circles and came to believe, through the war years, that the party had abandoned Black Americans for its own purposes. His wife Fanny McConnell, whom he married in 1946, supported the household and edited pages while he spent four years writing Invisible Man, an unnamed narrator's passage through the segregated South and Depression-era Harlem toward the realization that the country simply refused to see him. Published in 1952, it won the National Book Award the following year and was called, in a 1965 poll of authors and critics, the most important American novel since World War II.

He spent the rest of his life trying to write a second one and failing to finish it. He published essays, taught at Bard, Rutgers, Yale and NYU, and kept working on a novel that grew past 2,000 pages across drafts. In 1967 a fire at his summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts destroyed a large portion of the manuscript. He never recovered the momentum. Editors assembled two books from what survived after his death — Juneteenth in 1999 and Three Days Before the Shooting... in 2010 — but the novel he meant to publish never existed as a finished thing, and the reputation built entirely on one book from 1952 became, for Ellison himself, as much a weight as an honor.

He died of pancreatic cancer in New York in 1994 and is buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in Upper Manhattan. Invisible Man has never gone out of print and remains standard on American literature syllabi, its narrator's question about visibility read now against arguments Ellison did not live to see. Oklahoma City named a library for him, Harlem installed a bronze monument to the novel near where he lived, and the Postal Service put him on a stamp in 2014. The unfinished second novel still shadows the finished first one — proof, depending on who is arguing, either of a single unrepeatable achievement or of a writer who never escaped it.

Ralph Ellison's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Invisible Man book
  National Book Award, 1953 1952
• Shadow and Act book
  Essays, dedicated to his Tuskegee mentor Morteza Drexel Sprague 1964
• Going to the Territory book
  A second essay collection 1986
• Juneteenth book
  Assembled posthumously from the unfinished second novel 1999
• Three Days Before the Shooting... book
  A fuller posthumous edition of the same unfinished manuscript 2010

• 1916 aged ~3 His father dies of complications from a work injury Ralph was not yet three.
• 1933 aged ~20 Hops freight trains to enroll at Tuskegee Institute
• July 1936 aged 23 Moves to New York and meets Langston Hughes and Richard Wright
• 1946 aged ~33 Marries Fanny McConnell
• 1952 aged ~39 Publishes Invisible Man
• 1953 aged ~40 Wins the National Book Award
• 1967 aged ~54 A fire at his Plainfield, Massachusetts home destroys much of his second novel manuscript
• 1969 aged ~56 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• April 16, 1994 aged 81 Dies of pancreatic cancer in New York

• Richard Wright 1908–1960
  Novelist whose works exposed the psychological and structural violence of racism and urban poverty in America. mentor toward fiction
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. introduced him to New York literary circles
• Gordon Parks 1912–2006
  Photographer for Life magazine and first Black director of a major Hollywood studio film. collaborated on a photo essay