Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in 1913 in Oklahoma City, named after the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and studied music at the Tuskegee Institute before moving to New York City in 1936, where he became involved with the Federal Writers' Project and befriended writer Richard Wright.

Ellison served in the US Merchant Marine during the Second World War, and afterward began work on the novel that would define his career, drawing on his own experiences of racism, identity and the search for individual selfhood within a society that refused to see Black Americans clearly.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man told the story of an unnamed Black narrator navigating American society as, in his own words, a man rendered socially invisible; the novel won the National Book Award in 1953 and has since been consistently ranked among the greatest American novels of the twentieth century.

Despite the enormous success of Invisible Man, Ellison never completed a second novel during his lifetime, spending decades working on an ambitious manuscript that remained unfinished at his death; his widow and literary executor later edited portions into the posthumously published novel Juneteenth in 1999.

Ellison also published influential essay collections, including Shadow and Act, and taught at several major American universities; he died in 1994, and Invisible Man remains a foundational text in American literature and African American studies.