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Biography of Ralph Waldo EllisonName: Ralph Waldo EllisonBirth Date: March 1, 1914 Death Date: April 16, 1994 Place of Birth: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: author, novelist, editor Ralph Waldo Ellison American author Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) wrote "Invisible Man," a classic 20th-century American novel. He was an early spokesman among African Americans for the need for racial identity.Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City on March 1, 1914. His father, a construction worker, died when Ellison was 3, and his mother stretched a meager income as a domestic worker to support her son. He studied music at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936. He worked on the New York City Federal Writers Project, contributed stories, reviews, and essays to New Masses, the Antioch Review, and other journals (these writings have not yet been collected); and in 1942 became editor of the Negro Quarterly. He met Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during these years; both had a major influence on his work, along with T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and the Russian novelists.After brief duty in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, Ellison …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…oppression." The executor of his estate, John F. Callahan, selected and stitched together materials that Ellison had left unfinished to create the posthumous novel, Juneteenth (1999). In 2000, Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, was published. Associated Works Invisible Man (Book) Further Reading Perceptive critical comment on Ellison is available in Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (1958; rev. ed. 1965); Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1961); Marcus Klein, After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-century (1964); Jonathan Baumbach, The Landscape of Nightmare (1965); and Seymour L. Gross and John Edward Hardy, eds., Images of the Negro in American Literature (1966). The first biography of Ellison, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, by Lawerence Jackson, was published in 2001. Ralph Ellsion, Invisible Man, Random House, 1982.Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, Random House, 1964.Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory, Random House, 1986.Kimberly W. Benston, editor, The Black American Writer, Everett Edwards, 1969. |