Ellison was born in Oklahoma City and named after the US philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father, a construction foreman, died when he was three. Ellison played the trumpet and studied music at the Tuskegee Institute; in his mid-twenties he moved to New York. The classic Invisible Man was published in 1952. A second novel And Hickman Arrives was never completed, partly because the first draft of it was destroyed in a house fire; extracts did appear in a literary magazine in the 1960s, however. Similarly unfinished was his novel Juneteenth, but it was pieced together and published posthumously by Ellison's literary executor, John F Callahan. Ellison was an instructor in Russian and American Literature at Bard College, Annadale-on-Hudson 1958-61 and held visiting professorships at Chicago 1961, Rutgers 1962-64, and Yale University 1966. He was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University 1970-79.

quotations

Ellison, Ralph Waldo

weblinks

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man