Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914–94) was an American novelist, essayist, and educator. His 572-page naturalistic novel, Invisible Man (1952,) the only novel he published in his lifetime, is considered a masterpiece of modern literature. Ellison was an early spokesperson among African-Americans for the need for racial identity.
Born in Oklahoma City, the grandson of slaves, Ellison was named after another literary titan, Ralph Waldo Emerson. His formative years as a classically trained musician and a jazz trumpeter prepared him to approach “the arts analytically.” He was inspired to become a writer by the great African-American writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
Invisible Man traces the life of a young black man trying to find himself as an individual as well as with his race and society. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953 and has since grown in critical esteem and popularity. Revealing a mastery of language, symbolism, and allegory, and a humane sensibility, Invisible Man explores the African-American experience and American racial undercurrents. It also reveals how people share a universal “common humanity” despite their diverse geographic, ethnic, or social backgrounds.
For decades then, Ellison lectured at conferences and universities on the value of art and its power to explore the complex relationships of the human experience. His influence on American literature has been enormous—as a literary and social critic, he prodded America to cherish the humanity of its minorities.
For some forty years, Ellison worked sporadically on an unfinished second novel; it had grown to 2,000 pages. Excerpts appeared in various literary magazines in the ’60s. After his death, his literary executor gathered his papers, cut it down to 400 pages, published it posthumously as Juneteenth in 1999.
Ellison’s essays and interviews appeared in Shadow and Act (1964,) Going to the Territory (1986,) and the Collected Essays (2003) and his short fiction in Flying Home and Other Stories (1996.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ralph Ellison
Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs—which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.
—Ralph Ellison
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: Family
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: Commitment
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: America
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: Beauty
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: America
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: Words
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: Beginnings
I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: Exile, Prejudice
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
—Ralph Ellison
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
—Ralph Ellison
Topics: Life
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