Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.

Everyone should read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man at least once. Why? You ask. It is a novel of shared humanity….. and The idea of being invisible is particularly acute for marginalized people in America…… The novel highlights the interdependency of us all and the complexity of identity…… The lessons in the novel will be relevant in perpetuity and present a reflective moment worthy of analysis.

In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware.

Through the protagonist, Ellison explored 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 1953 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death.

And a few did you know ……

….. Ralph Waldo Ellison was named after the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. [OK probably guessed that one.]

Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. His father, Lewis, loved to read and named him after the 19th century essayist and poet. Unfortunately, Lewis Ellison died in an accident when Ellison was just 3 years old. Shards from a fallen 100-pound ice block pierced Lewis’s abdomen while he was delivering ice.

Ellison writes in his first essay collection Shadow & Act that he would learn later in life that his father hoped he’d become a poet.

…… To get to college, he had to hitch a ride on a train.

Ellison won a scholarship to attend the Tuskegee Institute, but he didn’t have the money to get there. Desperate for a chance at college life, he ended up hopping a train to Alabama from his home in Oklahoma City.

….. Ellison considered T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land an important influence.

After reading The Waste Land in college, Ellison began investigating literary criticism and other writing about Eliot’s work, not realizing writing would become the driving force of his adult life.

….. The novelist Richard Wright encouraged him to write his first short story.

While in New York City, he met Richard Wright at a reading. Wright, who is best known for his novel Native Son, asked Ellison to write a book review for a magazine he was editing. Based on the review, Wright encouraged him to try writing a short story. Ellison did, and Wright wanted to publish it.

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