Ralph Ellison

Introduction

Ralph Ellison

“I am invisible, understand, because people refuse to see me.” This line from author Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) embodies the dilemma of being black in America. Along with racial prejudice, Ellison experienced emotional and financial hardships in his young life, including the death of his father. Despite these difficulties, Ellison had an unstoppable passion for the arts. He began his career as a trumpet player at the Tuskegee Institute, but finding it too conservative for his unconventional jazz leanings, Ellison moved to New York to pursue a career as a visual artist. A happenstance meeting with the poet Langston Hughes and the novelist Richard Wright changed his artistic direction once again. In 1936, he joined the Federal Writers’ Project and found his true calling. Ellison died in 1994, leaving a legacy of innovative writing that still stirs passions.

Essential Facts

Though critically acclaimed, Invisible Man was controversial in the black community because Ellison wanted integration with white society rather than a completely separate black identity.
Ellison’s biological father named him after the nineteenth-century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, hoping the boy would grow up to be a poet.
He served in World War II as a cook and wrote the first lines of Invisible Man after the end of the war.
Ellison claimed his main influences were Russian writer Fydor Dostoyevsky and American author Richard Wright.
He won the National Medal of Arts in 1985 for his body of work.