Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in 1913 in Oklahoma City and named after the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father died when Ralph was three, and his mother worked to support the family. He loved music, played the trumpet, and in 1933 went to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to study music. In 1936 he moved to New York, intending to study sculpture, and there he met the writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, who encouraged him to write. He worked for the Federal Writers' Project, collecting folklore, and wrote reviews and stories. Toward the end of the Second World War he served in the Merchant Marine. His only novel published in his lifetime, Invisible Man (1952), tells of a young Black man who moves from the South to Harlem and feels that society refuses to see him as he really is. It won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison later taught at several universities, published essays such as Shadow and Act, and worked for decades on a second novel, which was published in part after his death. He died in New York in 1994.

Ralph Ellison is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia