Ellison, Ralph (1914-1994), an African American author, became famous for his novel Invisible Man (1952). The novel won the National Book Award in 1953.
Invisible Man tells the story of a young Black man’s quest for identity and meaning. Born in the South, the nameless first-person narrator is expelled from a Southern conservative, all-Black college. He then travels to New York City in search of greater opportunity. In the North, he briefly works as a painter and then associates with ”The Brotherhood,” an organization resembling the Communist Party. He defies all of the groups with which he associates because none of them allows him the power and freedom to define himself. At the novel’s end, the man escapes into a hole in the ground that he furnishes as a home to live as he likes.
Ellison’s novel is a complex work that integrates symbolism, African American folklore, and references to music, myth, and classic literature. One of the book’s themes is that white America refuses to “see” or acknowledge Black people as an equal part of American society, and thus African Americans are “invisible.”
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City. He wrote two collections of essays and nonfiction, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). Several early short stories were collected in Flying Home, published in 1996, more than two years after his death on April 16, 1994. An edited version of an unfinished novel was published as Juneteenth in 1999. In 2010, a compilation of multiple versions and fragments of Juneteenth was published as Three Days Before the Shooting. In 2019, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison was published.
