Ralph Ellison

Oklahoma

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City on 1 March 1913 and named after Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father, Lewis Ellison, sold ice and coal and died when Ralph was three; his mother, Ida, worked as a domestic servant and canvassed for the Socialist Party.[2]

Oklahoma had been a state for five years when he was born, and he later said that mattered. It had no long history of slavery in the way the Deep South did, and that sense of a place still being made shaped how he thought about being American.

He grew up poor. His mother brought home magazines and records from the houses she cleaned. He played trumpet from boyhood, studied music seriously at school, and wanted to be a composer of symphonies.[3]

Tuskegee

In 1933 Ellison went to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the college founded by Booker T. Washington, to study music. He travelled there from Oklahoma by riding freight trains, and was beaten by railway guards on the way.[4]

He studied trumpet and composition for three years. The library gave him the other education: he read T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land there and later said it disturbed and fascinated him more than any Black writing he had then encountered, because its shifts of rhythm and voice reminded him of jazz.[4]

He left in 1936, at the end of his third year, intending to earn money in New York for his final year, and never went back.[4]

New York, Hughes and Wright

In New York Ellison met Langston Hughes within days of arriving, and through Hughes he met Richard Wright in 1937. Wright was then finishing the stories that became Uncle Tom's Children.[4]

Wright pushed him to write. Ellison's first published piece was a book review Wright commissioned, and his first short story appeared in a magazine Wright edited. For several years Ellison was, in effect, Wright's apprentice, and he later spent a good deal of energy explaining how their aims differed.[4]

From 1938 he worked for the Federal Writers' Project in New York, collecting oral histories and street speech in Harlem. That work is audible in the novel: the voices in Invisible Man are transcribed as much as invented.[5]

The war

Ellison served in the Merchant Marine during the Second World War rather than the segregated army, working as a cook on supply convoys.[3]

He began Invisible Man in 1945, while on sick leave at a friend's farm in Vermont. The first sentence arrived, he said, as a joke he did not understand — "I am an invisible man" — and it took him seven years to work out what it meant.[6]

Invisible Man

Invisible Man was published in April 1952. It follows an unnamed narrator through a Southern Black college, a paint factory, a hospital, and a Harlem political organisation called the Brotherhood, to a Harlem riot and finally underground.[4]

The narrator's discovery is that everyone he meets — white trustees, Black college presidents, communists, nationalists — needs him to be a symbol of something, and none of them see the person. He ends in a hidden basement, stealing electricity to burn 1,369 light bulbs, writing the account that becomes the novel.

The novel is written in several styles at once: naturalism, surrealism, folk tale, sermon, political speech. Ellison had taken the modernist techniques he learned from Eliot and Joyce and used them on Black American material, which is why the book was received as a break with the protest novel that came before it.[6]

It won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison was thirty-nine.[1]

The argument with Wright and Howe

Invisible Man made Ellison famous and also made him a target. Some Black critics attacked it for refusing protest. Its narrator is not a victim in a system to be denounced, but a man discovering that every group around him wants him to stand for a cause rather than be seen as a person.

In 1963 the critic Irving Howe wrote an essay criticising Ellison and James Baldwin for abandoning Richard Wright's protest tradition. Ellison's reply, The World and the Jug, is one of the best-known essays in American criticism. He argued that a Black writer is not obliged to write about oppression alone, and that Wright had been his friend rather than his father. Howe, he said, was assigning him a role, exactly as the characters in his novel do to its narrator.[4]

The unfinished second novel

Ellison spent the rest of his life on a second novel. He published extracts from the 1960s onwards and spoke about it constantly, and it was never done.

In November 1967 a fire at his summer house in Plainfield, Massachusetts, destroyed part of the manuscript. Ellison said the loss set him back badly. The scale of what burned has been disputed since — the surviving papers suggest less was lost than the story implies — but the fire became the standard explanation for a book that was already years late.[5]

At his death he left more than two thousand pages of drafts. His literary executor, John Callahan, edited a version published as Juneteenth in 1999, and a fuller scholarly assembly, Three Days Before the Shooting…, followed in 2010.[5]

Paris, 1954

In 1954 Ellison sat for a long interview in Paris, at the Café de la Mairie on the place Saint-Sulpice. Alfred Chester and Vilma Howard conducted it for the Paris Review. The result, The Art of Fiction No. 8, appeared in the spring 1955 issue, and it is the fullest account he ever gave of how Invisible Man was built.[6]

The magazine's own introduction to the piece noted that Djuna Barnes had written Nightwood in the same café.[6]

Paris held a substantial community of Black American writers by then. James Baldwin had arrived in 1948 with almost nothing and stayed. Ellison did not join it, and in 1956 he turned down an invitation to the Présence Africaine congress of Black writers held in the city.

Teacher and public man

Ellison taught for decades — at Bard, Rutgers, Chicago, and from 1970 as a professor at New York University, where he stayed until 1979. He won the Rome Prize in 1955 and spent two years at the American Academy in Rome.[2]

He published two books of essays in his lifetime: Shadow and Act in 1964, and Going to the Territory in 1986. The essays cover jazz, the blues, Mark Twain, American identity and his own education. They carry his central argument. Black and white American culture are not separate; the country's language, music and humour are already mixed; and a Black American writer inherits all of Western literature, not a segregated portion of it.[4]

His argument that American culture is already mixed, and that a Black writer inherits all of Western literature, put him at odds with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which regarded him as insufficiently militant. He did not change it.

Death

Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer at his home on Riverside Drive in New York on 16 April 1994, aged eighty-one. His wife Fanny, whom he married in 1946, survived him.[2]

He is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery in Manhattan. A memorial sculpture, a fifteen-foot bronze with a standing figure cut out of it, was installed near his Harlem home in 2003.

Why Ralph Ellison matters

Invisible Man changed what an American novel could do with race. It refused both the protest novel and the sociological case study, and it told a Black American life using the techniques of modernist fiction, which no American novel of that length had done before.

The essays make the same argument in a different form. Ellison argued, against considerable pressure from several directions, that American culture is inseparably mixed, and that the country's music and speech prove it. That position is now common and was not when he took it.