Background
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, 1914, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. His father, a construction worker, died when Ellison was 3, and his mother stretched a meager income as a domestic worker to support her son.
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critic essayist novelist jazz musician
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, 1914, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. His father, a construction worker, died when Ellison was 3, and his mother stretched a meager income as a domestic worker to support her son.
Ellison graduated from high school in 1931. He worked for a year, and found the money to make a down payment on a trumpet, using it to play with local musicians, and to take further music lessons.
He applied twice for admission to Tuskegee Institute, the prestigious all-black university in Alabama founded by Booker T. Washington. He was finally admitted in 1933 for lack of a trumpet player in its orchestra. Ellison hopped freight trains to get to Alabama, and was soon to find out that the institution was no less class-conscious than white institutions generally were.
Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by composer William L. Dawson. Ellison also was guided by the department's piano instructor, Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent his free time in the library with modernist classics. He cited reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a major awakening moment. In 1934, he began to work as a desk clerk at the university library, where he read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Librarian Walter Bowie Williams enthusiastically let Ellison share in his knowledge.
A major influence upon Ellison was English teacher Morteza Drezel Sprague, to whom Ellison later dedicated his essay collection Shadow and Act. He opened Ellison's eyes to "the possibilities of literature as a living art" and to "the glamour he would always associate with the literary life. " Through Sprague Ellison became familiar with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, identifying with the "brilliant, tortured anti-heroes" of those works.
Ellison studied music at Tuskegee Institute to 1936, and then worked as a jazz musician before coming to New York in the late 1930's to pursue a career in sculpture.
He was an early spokesman among African Americans for the need for racial identity.
He met Richard Wright and Langston Hughes after moving to New York; both had a major influence on his work, along with T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and the Russian novelists.
Langston Hughes, "Harlem's unofficial diplomat" of the Depression era, and one—as one of the country's celebrity black authors—who could live from his writing. Hughes introduced him to the black literary establishment with Communist sympathies.
With the author Richard Wright Ellison would have a long and complicated relationship. After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged him to write fiction as a career. His first published story was "Hymie's Bull, " inspired by Ellison's 1933 hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, Ellison had over 20 book reviews, as well as short stories and articles, published in magazines such as New Challenge and The New Masses.
After brief duty in the U. S. Merchant Marine during World War II, Ellison won a Rosenwald fellowship to work on the novel which brought him instant recognition and the National Book Award, Invisible Man (1952).
Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of man's search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African American man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel also contains taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism.
Ellison's other writings include two volumes of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986).
In 1964 he began to teach at Rutgers University and Yale University. The following year, a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War II.
For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus. " A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death. His influence on American literature has been tremendous.
Ellison lost his faith in the Communist Party during World War II, when he felt the party had betrayed African Americans and replaced Marxist class politics with social reformism. In a letter to the author Richard Wright, dated August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. . .. Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell. "
Quotations:
"Education is all a matter of building bridges".
"The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike".
"I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed".
Ralph Waldo Ellison was the second of three brothers; firstborn Alfred died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice (or Millsap) was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, Ellison’s father, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died in 1916 after an operation to cure internal wounds suffered after shards from a 100-lb ice block penetrated his abdomen when it was dropped while being loaded into a hopper. The elder Ellison loved literature, and doted on his children, so Ralph discovered as an adult that his father had hoped his son would grow up to be a poet.
In 1921, Ellison's mother, Ida Millsap, and her children moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother. Ida remarried three times after Lewis died.
In 1938 Ellison met Rosa Araminta Poindexter, a woman two years his senior. They were married in late 1938. Rose was a stage actress, and continued her career after their marriage. In 1941 he briefly had an affair with Sanora Babb, which he confessed to his wife afterward, and in 1943 the marriage was over.
In 1946, he married Fanny McConnell, an accomplished person in her own right: a scholarship graduate of the University of Iowa who was a founder of the Negro People's Theater in Chicago and a writer for The Chicago Defender.
He was a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died in 1916 after an operation to cure internal wounds suffered after shards from a 100-lb ice block penetrated his abdomen when it was dropped while being loaded into a hopper.
Ida remarried three times after Lewis died.
Died in infancy.
He was born in 1916.
She was a a scholarship graduate of the University of Iowa and helped support Ellison financially while he wrote Invisible Man by working for American Medical Center for Burma Frontiers (the charity supporting Gordon S. Seagrave's medical missionary work.
Rose was a stage actress.
