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Ralph Ellison (519 hits)

Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913 - April 16, 1994) was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). Research by Lawrence Jackson, one of Ellison's biographers, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought.

In 1933, Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor Charles L. Dawson (the Tuskegee choir was invited to play at many prestigious locations throughout the world, including Radio City). Ellison also had the fortune to come under the close tutelage of the piano instructor Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent increasing amounts of time in the library, reading up on modernist classics. He specifically cited The Waste Land as a major awakening moment for him.

Ellison was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, photographer and college professor. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994, and was buried in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. His wife, who survived him, lived until November 19, 2005.

After his death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home: And Other Stories in 1996. Five years after his death, under the editorship of John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor, Ellison's second novel, Juneteenth, was published. It was a 368-page condensation of over 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of forty years. All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel will be published on June 17, 2008 by Modern Library, under the tentative title Three Days Before the Shooting.