Ralph Waldo Ellison"(March 1,1914-April 16,1994)

Was an American novelist,literary critic,scholar,scholar and writer.He was born in Oklahoma

City,Oklahoma.Ralph is best known for his novel Invisible Man,which won the National Book Award in 1953.He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964),a collection of political,social and critical essays,and Going to the The Territory (1986).Ralph is named after Ralph Waldo Emerson.Born to Lewis Afred and Ida Millsap.Research by Lawrence Jackson,one his biographers,has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought.Ralph had one brother named Herbert Millsap Ellison who was born in 1916.Lewis a small-business owner and a construction foreman,died when Ralph was three years old from stomach uclers he received from an ice-delivering accident.Many years later,Ralph would find out that his daddy hoped he would grow up to be a poet.In 1933,Ralph entered  Tuskegee University on a scholarship to study music.Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school,headed by the conductor William L.Dawson.Ralph also had the good fortune to come under the close tutelage of the piano instructor Hazel Harrison.While he studied music primarily in his classes,he spent increasing amounts of time in the library,reading up on modernist classics.He specifically cited reading T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land a a major awakening moment for him.After his third year,he moved to New York City the visual arts.He studied sculpture and photography.He made acquaintance with the artist Romare Bearden.Perhaps Ralph's most important contact would be with the author Richard Wright,with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship.After  he wrote a book review for Richard, he encouraged Ralph to pursue a career in writing,specifically fiction.The first published story written by Ralph was a short story entitled "Hymie's Bull", a story inspired by Ralph's hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee.From 1937 to 1944 he had over twenty books reviews as well as short stories and articles published in magazines such as New Challenge and New Masses Richard  was at time openly associated  with the Communist Party,and Ralph himself was publishing and editing for communist publications,as historian Carol Polsgrove has written,his affiliation was quieter."Both Richard and Ralph lost their faith in the Communist Party during World War2 when they felt the party had betrayed African American and replaced Marxist class politics for social reformism.In a letter a letter to Richard,August 18,1945,Ralph poured out his anger toward the 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 chosen,well written words,smash all that crummy filth to hell."In the wake of of this disillusion,Ralph began writing Invisible Man,a novel that was,in part,his response to the party's betrayal.World War 2 was nearing its end when Ralph,reluctant to serve in the segregated army,chose merchant marine service over the draft.In 1946,he married his second wife,Fanny McConnell.She worked as a photographer to help sustain Ralph.From 1947 to 1951 he earned some money writing book reviews,but spent most of his time working on Invisible Man.Fanny also helped type Ralph's longhand text and assisted her husband in editing the typecast as it progressed.Published in 1952,explores the theme of man's search for his identity and place in society,as seem from the perspective of an unnamed black in New York City in the 1930s.In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin,Ralph created characters that are dispassionate,educated,articulate and self-aware.Through the protagonist,he 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,with its treatment of taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism,won the National Book Award in 1953.The award was his ticket in to the American literary establishment.Disillusioned by his experience with the Communist Party,he used his new fame to speak out for literature as a moral instrument.In 1955,he went abroad to Europe to travel and lecture before setting for a time in Rome,Italy,where he wrote an essay that appeared in Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest in 1957.Robert Penn Warren was in Rome during the same time and the two writers became close friends.In 1958,Ralph returned to the United States to take position teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College an to begin a second novel,Juneteenth.During the 1950s he corresponded with his lifelong friend,the writer  Albert Murray.In their letters they commented on the development of their careers,the civil rights movement and other common interests including jazz.Much of this material was published in the collection Trading Twelves (2000).In 1964,Ralph published Shadow and Act,a collection of essays,and began to teach at Rutgers University and Yale University,while continuing to work on his novel.The following year,a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War 2.In 1967,he experience a major house fire at his home in Planfield,Massachusetts,in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost.Ralph said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man,that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel,"and despite the award,he was usatisfieldOrde des Arts et des Letters by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities,serving from 1970 to 1980.In 1975,Ralph was elected to The American-Academy of Arts and Letters and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library.Continuing to teach,he published mostly essays,and in 1984 he received the New York City Colleges'sLanston Hughes Medal.In 1985,he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.In 1986,his Going to the Territory was published.This a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ralph's friend Richard Wright,as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.In 1992,Ralph was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.He was also an accomplished sculptor,musician,photographer,and college professor.He taught at Bard College,Rutgers University,the University of Chicago,and New York University.Ralph was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.He died,of pancreatic cancer,and was buried at Trinity Church Cemtery in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.He was survived by his wife,Fanny Ellison,who died on November 19,2005.