Invisible Man | Author Biography

As a boy, Ralph Waldo Ellison announced that his ambition was to become a Renaissance man. ‘‘I was taken very early,’’ he would write, ‘‘with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond.’’ Ellison was born on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Ida Millsap and Lewis Ellison, who died when Ralph was three. Ellison’s mother worked tirelessly to provide a stimulating environment for Ralph and his brother, and her influence on the writer was profound.

Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison

In 1933, at the age of nineteen, Ellison hopped a freight train to Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, where he majored in music. In the summer of 1935, he traveled north to New York City to earn money for his last year in college; he never returned to Tuskegee. Instead, he stayed in New York and worked for a year as a freelance photographer, file clerk, and builder and seller of hi-fi systems, still intending a career in music. But then Richard Wright the noted author of Black Boy and Native Son, invited him to write a book review for the 1937 issue of New Challenge, and Ellison's career was decided.

In 1938 Ellison joined the Federal Writers Project, which gave him opportunities to do research and to write, and helped to build his appreciation of folklore. Like other black intellectuals in the 1930s, he found the Communist party's active anti-racist stance appealing, but Ellison was also a fervent individualist, and he never became a party member. During 1942 Ellison was managing editor of the Negro Quarterly, but thereafter he turned to writing stories. Two of his most acclaimed stories before the publication of Invisible Man were ‘‘Flying Home’’ (1944) and ‘‘King of the Bingo Game’’ (1944); both dealt with questions of identity. Ellison met Fanny McConnell in 1944, and the couple married in 1946.

During World War II Ellison served as a cook in the merchant marines. He returned to the United States in 1945 and began Invisible Man. The novel appeared in 1952 and was a commercial and critical success, winning the National Book Award in 1953, although some black nationalists felt the novel was not political enough. Ellison continued to write short stories, and in 1964 he published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays and interviews about the meaning of experience. Many awards and lecture and teaching engagements followed, both at home and abroad, and Ellison became regarded as an expert on African-American culture and folklore, American studies, and creative writing.

The major question of Ellison's later life was whether and when he would publish another novel. He had reportedly been working on a book since 1955, but his progress was slow, and in 1967 a fire at Ellison's home destroyed about 350 pages of the manuscript. The novel was left unfinished at his death, although eight excerpts from it have been published in literary journals. In 1986 Ellison published Going to the Territory, a collection of previously published speeches, reviews, and essays. He died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994.