RALPH ELLISON March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994

Background  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma – frontier state with no history of slavery, modern view  Named after Ralph Waldo Emerson  Father wanted him to be a poet  Attended the Tuskegee Institute to study music on scholarship  Left school after three years and moved to New York City to study the visual arts  Parallels to Invisible Man

Writing Career  Began in NYC when Ellison met Richard Wright  Wright was a black author who wrote protest literature against racism  He encouraged Ellison to begin writing fiction  Wrote book reviews and short stories about “the black experience” while working on Invisible Man, which he published in 1952  A perfectionist in writing, he spent his life attempting to write “a major novel”  Wrote over 2000 pages of manuscripts for his second novel, but never finished. Parts of this writing were published in the novel Juneteenth after his death.

Ellison’s Ideas and Influences  Growing up in Oklahoma in the 1910s gave Ellison very modern ideas on race interactions compared to those in the Northern and Southern states  “The task of the writer is to tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.”  Wanted to show the influences of African-American culture in American life through highly developed, educated black characters – different from the image of the time period

Beyond Race  Ellison wrote about American culture in the 1930’s – the search for individual identity and place in society – not about racism. Race relations just happened to be the leading issue in 1930’s America.  “There are two types of people: those who wear their everyday clothes on Sunday, and those who wear their Sunday clothes every day. I want to wear Sunday clothes every day.”  Ellison’s modern views allowed him to explore his own black identity and his values through his characters  “Ralph Ellison taught me what it is to be an American.”