Ralph Ellison Biography Quotes 19 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, 1913, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the son of Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap Ellison. His father, who admired the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, named him in honor of the American philosopher, a gesture that hinted at the life of letters his son would eventually lead. After his father died in a work-related accident when Ellison was still very young, his mother supported the family through domestic work and other jobs, instilling in her sons a belief in education, discipline, and self-reliance. Growing up in a segregated city yet surrounded by the energy of a thriving Black community, Ellison developed a passion for music, literature, and craftsmanship. He played the trumpet and dreamed of becoming a composer, a path that took him in 1933 to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a school founded by Booker T. Washington and renowned for its rigorous training and discipline. At Tuskegee, Ellison studied music and absorbed a broader humanistic education in the library and classrooms, even as financial strains and the pull of wider horizons began to redirect his ambitions.

Arrival in New York and Apprenticeship
In 1936 Ellison traveled to New York City, initially intending to earn money for school. The city became his true classroom. In Harlem he met the novelist Richard Wright, who recognized his talent and encouraged him to try fiction and nonfiction, offering introductions that opened doors to journals and to the Federal Writers Project. Ellison also encountered figures such as Langston Hughes and the critic Kenneth Burke, who helped him think about rhetoric, symbol, and the uses of tradition in modern writing. He published reviews, essays, and short stories, experimenting with voice and form while taking on varied jobs to support himself. In 1938 he married Rose Poindexter; the marriage ended several years later. These years were marked by artistic apprenticeship and by engagement with the political and cultural debates that swirled through Harlem and the broader American left, experiences that later deepened the complexity of his fiction.

War Years and the Writing of Invisible Man
During World War II, Ellison served in the United States Merchant Marine. After the war, supported in part by literary fellowships, he turned with sustained focus to a novel. He began Invisible Man in the mid-1940s and worked on it intensely for years, shaping a narrative voice at once lyrical, ironic, and philosophically probing. Published in 1952, the book follows an unnamed Black narrator through a series of encounters with institutions, ideologies, and illusions, from the Jim Crow South to the streets and cellars of Harlem. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, an extraordinary recognition for a first novel and a milestone for American literature. The book brought Ellison wide acclaim and made him a central figure in national conversations about race, democracy, and individual identity. In 1946 he married Fanny McConnell, whose editorial acumen, steady counsel, and practical support were crucial to his work; Fanny Ellison was a constant collaborator and companion throughout the rest of his life.

Essays, Music, and Cultural Criticism
Ellison was as much an essayist as a novelist. He believed American identity emerged out of a complex interplay of traditions, and he turned to criticism to explore that tangle. In Shadow and Act (1964) and later in Going to the Territory (1986), he wrote about memory, folklore, race, politics, and the moral demands of art. Music, especially jazz and the blues, ran through his criticism; he wrote memorably about Louis Armstrong and the improvisatory ethos that shaped American aesthetic life. His friendship with the novelist and critic Albert Murray sharpened these insights; the two carried on a long and spirited correspondence about music, myth, and the rituals of American community. Ellison also collaborated with the photographer Gordon Parks, exploring Harlem in words and images and seeking forms adequate to the citys layered realities. He sparred intellectually with critics such as Irving Howe over the relationship between art and ideology, defending the autonomy and complexity of fiction against reductive political prescriptions. Across these endeavors, Ellison insisted that the American experiment was tragic, comic, and improvisatory all at once, and that its literature must be equal to that drama.

Teaching and Public Life
As his reputation grew, Ellison accepted invitations to teach and lecture. He held appointments at institutions including Bard College and the University of Chicago, and later he became a distinguished professor at New York University. In the classroom and in public lectures he encouraged close attention to craft and structure and urged younger writers to study the breadth of American and European traditions alongside the vernacular arts of their own communities. He contributed essays and reviews to leading magazines and served on cultural panels, taking seriously a public role as a guardian of literary standards and a participant in the civic conversation. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a recognition of his standing among peers.

The Long Second Novel
After Invisible Man, Ellison began a second, ambitious novel that would occupy him for decades. A devastating house fire in 1967 at his summer place in Massachusetts destroyed a portion of his manuscript, deepening both the practical and psychological challenge of the project. He continued to write, revise, and reconceive the work over the years, producing stories, chapters, and scenes that circled themes of memory, race, leadership, and the fugitive energies of American speech. Friends and interlocutors such as Albert Murray and a circle of editors and scholars read parts of the manuscript, while Fanny Ellison remained his closest reader and advocate. Ellison never brought the book to final form in his lifetime, but after his death his literary executor, John F. Callahan, edited a substantial portion into the volume Juneteenth (1999). Later, Callahan and Adam Bradley assembled a more expansive scholarly edition, Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010), which revealed the scale and evolving architecture of Ellisons unfinished design.

Final Years and Legacy
Ellison spent his later years in New York, writing daily, teaching periodically, and maintaining a network of friendships with writers, musicians, and scholars. He remained devoted to the idea that American democracy, despite its failures and betrayals, could be renewed through acts of imagination and the responsible use of cultural memory. He died in New York City on April 16, 1994, from pancreatic cancer. Fanny Ellison survived him and safeguarded his papers, enabling the careful editorial work that followed. Ellisons influence is visible in generations of writers who grapple with identity, visibility, and the moral imagination, and in critics who draw upon his essays to think about the interdependence of high art and the vernacular. The people around him shaped that legacy: Ida Millsap Ellisons determination and Lewis Alfred Ellisons Emersonian aspiration; Richard Wrights early encouragement and Langston Hughess collegial example; Gordon Parkss eye and camera; Albert Murrays camaraderie and debate; Irving Howes provocations; and John F. Callahans stewardship. Through them, and through an America whose cacophony he translated into art, Ellison fashioned a body of work that continues to challenge, unsettle, and inspire.

Our collection contains 19 quotes who is written by Ralph, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Truth - Art - Music.

Other people realated to Ralph: Saul Bellow (Novelist), Stanley Crouch (Critic), Alfred Kazin (Critic)

• 2010 Three Days Before the Shooting... (Novel)
• 1999 Juneteenth (Novel)
• 1996 Flying Home and Other Stories (Collection)
• 1986 Going to the Territory (Collection)
• 1964 Shadow and Act (Collection)
• 1952 Invisible Man (Novel)