Ellison, Ralph Waldo

(b. 1 March 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; d. 16 April 1994 in New York City), novelist, essayist, and man of letters best known for Invisible Man (1952), the first novel by an African American to win the National Book Award.

Ellison was the elder of two sons born to Lewis Alfred Ellison, the owner of a small ice and coal business who died when the older boy was three years old, and Ida Mill-sap, a domestic who canvassed for the Socialist Party and was later jailed several times for breaking the segregated housing ordinance in Oklahoma City during the early 1930s. After remarrying in the early 1920s, Ellison’s mother and her husband, John Bell, raised Ralph and his brother in Oklahoma City.

Ellison attended the Frederick Douglass School for twelve years, graduating in 1931. As a boy he was drawn to music; his mother bought him a used cornet, and by the age of eight he was a member of the school band. Encouraged by his mother, who often brought home Vanity Fair,Literary Digest, and other magazines from the houses she cleaned, Ellison became an insatiable reader at a young age. In 1933 the state of Oklahoma awarded him a scholarship (a means of keeping black students out of state colleges), and Ellison used it to study music at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. A music major, Ellison worked part-time in the library, where he discovered modern writers such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) especially intrigued him; he found similarities between the literary techniques of Eliot and the jazz techniques of Louis Armstrong, which he later pursued in his fiction.

In July 1936, after his junior year at Tuskegee, Ellison went to New York City to earn money for his senior year and to study sculpture, and he stayed. Once in New York, he met and was befriended by the poet Langston Hughes. A meeting with the author Richard Wright in June of 1937 and subsequent friendship led Ellison toward becoming a writer. Wright encouraged him to review a novel for the radical journal New Challenge, which Wright edited, and to try his hand at writing a short story. During this period Ellison agitated on behalf of Republican Spain and was involved in the campaign for the release of the Scottsboro boys, nine young black men convicted and sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of raping two white women in a boxcar in Alabama.

In October 1937 Ellison was called to his mother’s bedside in Dayton, Ohio, where she had moved in 1935 or 1936 after John Bell’s death. She passed away the morning after he arrived, and penniless, he stayed in Dayton with his brother for almost seven months. There Ellison earned his living by shooting wild game and selling it to General Motors executives. These months proved a turning point for Ellison, as he began seriously to write fiction after hours in the law offices of W. O. Stokes, one of the first black attorneys in Dayton. Until April 1938 when a Works Progress Administration (WPA) job allowed him to return to New York, Ellison wrote drafts or partial drafts of several stories, two or three sketches, and a novel referred to as “Slick,” which he later abandoned.

From 1938 until World War II, Ellison worked on the New York Federal Writers Project of the WPA. Starting in the late 1930s, he contributed reviews, essays, and short fiction to New Masses, Tomorrow, The Negro Quarterly (of which for a time he was managing editor), The New Republic, Saturday Review, The Antioch Review, The Reporter, and other periodicals. Ellison married Rose Poindexter on 16 September 1938. They were divorced in 1945, and a year later he married Fanny McConnell with whom he lived until his death in 1994. They had no children.

From 1943 until 1945, Ellison, preferring not to serve in the segregated U.S. Army, served in the merchant marine. He worked as a cook on ships transporting arms across the Atlantic to the Allies in Great Britain and the Soviet Union. On sick leave back in the United States, he began Invisible Man in July 1945 at a friend’s place in Waitsfield, Vermont. While working on what he called his “prison camp novel,” Ellison found his fingers typing a strange, apparently unrelated sentence: “I am an invisible man.” Intrigued, he resisted the impulse to destroy the page, and his mind began to fill in the lineaments of the character who would say such a thing. Soon he had a novel going, and Ellison wrote Invisible Man over the next seven years. During these years Ellison lived and worked in New York City, except for occasional forays to Bennington College in Vermont, where he met and discussed literature and literary form with Kenneth Burke, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson, and R. W. B. Lewis.

Upon its publication in 1952, Invisible Man was recognized as one of the most important works of fiction of its time. In the journal Commentary, Saul Bellow called it a “book of the very first order, a superb book … a brilliant individual victory.” Foreshadowing trouble to come for Ellison in the 1960s, defenders of Black Nationalism and the Communist Party were harshly critical. But negative responses were few; more typical was the verdict of the National Book Award jury. Noting that “Mr. Ellison has the courage to take many literary risks,” the jury awarded Invisible Man its prize for fiction in 1953. In years to come the stature of Ellison’s novel only increased. A 1965 Book, Week Pool of 200 authors, critics, and editors named Invisible Man “the most distinguished single work” published in the previous twenty years.

The acclaim given to Invisible Man opened up new horizons and opportunities for Ellison. In 1954 he was invited to lecture in Germany and at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. In 1955 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Prix de Rome, enabling him to spend two years in residence at the American Academy from 1955 to 1957. During this time he was earnestly at work on the novel that he hoped would soon follow Invisible Man. But first in Rome and later in New York, he found himself torn between fiction and a critical prose that explored themes similar to those he pursued in fiction: “the word and the contradiction of the word” of the American ideal as well as the discovery and “the evasion of identity.” Important essays from this period include “Society, Morality and the Novel,” written for The Living Novel (1957), a book of critical essays edited by Granville Hicks, and “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” published as an exchange with Stanley Edgar Hyman in Partisan Review in 1958. While he was at the American Academy in Rome, Ellison also served as American representative at literary conferences in London, Mexico City, and Tokyo.

Returning to the United States, Ellison taught Russian and American literature at Bard College in New York from 1958 to 1961; for most of that time he lived in Saul Bellow’s house in Tivoli not far from the Hudson River, where he hunted with his black Labrador retriever, Tucka Tarby. In 1960 the first and longest excerpt from his novel-in-progress to be published in his lifetime appeared in print in Noble Savage, a new journal edited by Bellow. Additional selections from the work were published in 1960 and 1963. However, the next book of Ellison’s to appear was not the novel but Shadow and Act, a collection of essays published in 1964. This volume established Ellison as an essayist and an American man of letters to be reckoned with, as well as a formidable novelist.

In the middle to late 1960s, as he continued to struggle with his second novel, Ellison began to feel the heat of criticism from black militants and exponents of the Black Arts movement, who resented his continued stance in favor of racial integration. At the same time he fell into conflict with some of his literary colleagues, both black and white, because of his support for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policy in Vietnam. Ellison defended the Vietnam War “less out of patriotic enthusiasm than tragic necessity.” The United States, he felt, had “certain responsibilities to the Vietnamese and the structure of power in the world.”

Meanwhile, the rewritten contract for Ellison’s long-awaited second novel was signed on 17 August 1965, stipulating delivery by 1 September 1967. In his mind Ellison was moving toward completion in the summer or fall of 1967. Then, on 29 November, a fire at Ellison’s summer home in the Berkshires destroyed what Ellison described as both “a section of my work-in-progress” and “a year’s worth of revisions.” Although Ellison may have reimagined and reconstructed the lost material, arguably he never attained a full, sure-handed grasp of the totality of his ambitious saga of racial complexity and American identity. Between 1969 and 1977 he published four more excerpts from the work in literary quarterlies. On and off for the rest of his life, he stayed at work on his ever expanding novel-in-progress, but he never finished. In one of the paradoxes of Ellison’s literary life, during each year and each of the four decades in which his second novel failed to appear, his first novel, Invisible Man, continued to grow in critical reputation and popularity.

Despite only one novel and a single book of essays to his credit, the influence and importance of Ellison’s work was such that he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969; the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1970 by the French minister of culture, André Malraux, whose novel La condition humaine (Man’s Fate, 1933) had inspired Ellison in the 1930s; the Langston Hughes Medallion for contributions in arts and letters by City College of New York in 1984; and the National Medal of Arts in 1985. Ellison was a charter member of the National Council on the Arts and Humanities, and he received honorary degrees from Tuskegee, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, Williams College, Harvard University, and Wesleyan University.

From 1970 to 1979 Ellison held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at New York University. After his retirement he published Going to the Territory (1986), a second collection of essays. Although he worked steadily on the second novel, Ellison published no further excerpts in his lifetime. Close to his eightieth birthday, he told an interviewer that “there will be something very soon.” But within a month he was stricken with a virulent, rapidly accelerating case of pancreatic cancer. When Ellison died on 16 April 1994, at his home on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, the novel and other literary projects were left unfinished. He is buried in Trinity Cemetery in New York City.

Ellison left behind a remarkable array of rich manuscripts, correspondence, and papers. Between 1995 and 2000 four volumes were posthumously published, including The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995); Flying Home and Other Stories (1996); Juneteenth (1999), the central narrative of his unfinished novel; and Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000). Yet to be published were a scholarly edition of the fragments of the unfinished second novel, a volume of letters, and memoirs of Ellison’s early life in Oklahoma and his experience in New York in the 1930s. Since Ellison’s death, interest in his work and his life has accelerated in the United States and abroad, where foreign language editions of his fiction and, to a lesser extent his essays, sprout like dragon’s teeth. The publication of the posthumous Juneteenth, edited by his literary executor, John F. Callahan, prompted reconsideration of Ellison’s place in literary history. By virtue of Invisible Man and the rest of his oeuvre, a consensus is forming that he occupies a place of preeminence not only in American and African American literature but also in twentieth-century world literature.

Ralph Ellison’s papers and correspondence are in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. There is also Ellison material in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University and in the archives of New York University. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh, eds., Conversations with Ralph Ellison (1995), is a collection of his interviews. Collections of critical essays by Ellison and others, and interviews with Ellison, include John Hersey, ed., Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays (1970); Michael S. Harper and John Wright, eds., the Carleton Miscellany (winter 1980); Kimberly W. Benston, ed., Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison (1987); and Robert J. Butler, ed., The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison (2000). Among several noteworthy books about Ellison and his work are Robert G. O’Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980), and Mark Busby, Ralph Ellison (1991). Eric J. Sundquist, Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1995), is a useful casebook on that novel. There is an obituary in the New York Times (17 Apr. 1994).

John F. Callahan