Ralph Ellison (1913-1994). Biography and Creativity

Although he published only one finished novel, Invisible Man, and a small number of self-contained short stories, Ralph Ellison remains one of the most widely honored of all African-American writers of fiction. Invisible Man was hailed as a classic almost from the moment of its first appearance, and indeed the enormous praise that greeted the book may have contributed to the exceptional pressure Ellison felt to produce a worthy successor.

This pressure resulted, ironically, in years (and then in decades) of creative inhibition, as Ellison worked on a huge manuscript that never did result in a complete and coherent second novel. Excerpts were occasionally published, but when he died in 1994, he had become almost as famous for the absence of his second novel as for the distinction of his first. Nevertheless, his career had been productive in numerous other ways: He often wrote essays, frequently gave speeches, and repeatedly served on boards, commissions, panels, and agencies. Although disdained by many younger black writers (who saw him as reactionary and ungenerous), at his death he was still regarded as the author of one of the most important works of 20th-century American fiction.

Many of the most important facts of Ellison’s life are laid out in Arnold Rampersad’s biography and in the helpful chronology prepared by Robert Butler (xli-xlv). Although Ellison’s birth was often misre- ported as occurring in 1914, he was actually born on March 1, 1913, in Oklahoma City, the first son of Lewis Ellison (a small businessman who sold coal and ice) and Ida Milsap Ellison (a loving mother with a strong social conscience). Ellison’s first and middle names—Ralph Waldo—reflect the fact that he was named after the great 19th-century American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

These given names reflect the ambitions his parents had for him: Ralph’s father hoped that his son would become a poet, and Ralph’s mother always encouraged his interest in reading and desire to learn. As the son of lower-middle-class blacks who were living outside the Deep South, Ralph began life in a slightly more fortunate position than many other members of his race, but his fortunes soon took a decided turn for the worse when his father died, on July 19, 1916, from an accident when Ralph was three years old. Suddenly the family (which now included a recently born younger brother) found themselves destitute; Ralph’s widowed mother could not, at first, even afford to bury her husband, whose body had rapidly begun to deteriorate in the hot Oklahoma summer. Mrs. Ellison soon had to begin working as a maid to support her children, often taking home reading material from the homes where she worked.

She also always encouraged her sons to take their schooling seriously. Ralph, in fact, became a good student and a voracious reader; he attended a rigorous high school and often visited the local library. In school he not only studied and played sports but also developed an intense interest in music, so that by the time he graduated he had become an accomplished trumpet player. He loved both the classics and jazz, eventually aspiring to be a composer who would draw on the traditions of black harmonies, techniques, rhythms, and melodies. In the meantime, Ellison had also been working a series of part-time jobs that gave him exposure to a wide slice of “real life”—life that was often far from pleasant for a poor black youth.

Although Ellison’s initial attempts to go to college were frustrated, eventually he was granted a scholarship to study music at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. At that time, Tuskegee was the most famous institution of higher learning for blacks in the United States (if not the world), although it had begun to lose much of the luster it possessed when it was first founded by Booker T. Washington at the end of the 19th century. Arriving in Tuskegee in 1933 after a somewhat harrowing trip in which he had been forced by poverty to hitch an illegal ride on a freight train as it moved through the segregated and often hostile South, Ellison hoped to study at the institute with the noted black composer Walter L. Dawson.

He did, but his experiences with the often-distant Dawson were disappointing. In fact, Ellison’s entire experience at Tuskegee left much to be desired; he found the school stifling, overregimented, uninspired, and uninspiring. Despite these shortcomings, Ellison did encounter a few mentors who challenged and encouraged him—including an English professor and a friendly librarian. His interests began to shift from music to sculpture, but he was also taking advantage of the school’s library. Here Ellison read widely and developed a growing interest in modern American literature—and especially in T. S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land. After finishing his junior year at Tuskegee, financial difficulties (as well as tension with the administrators) made it difficult for Ellison to return for his final year. He thus made the fateful decision to go to New York City, earn some money there, study sculpture with a noted artist, and perhaps return to Tuskegee at some later time. As it happened, he never returned—at least not as a student. When he eventually did, it was to be honored by an alma mater he had not altogether enjoyed.

During his time at the institute, Ellison had happened to meet the noted Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who was known for generously encouraging younger colleagues. As luck would have it, in 1936 Ellison ran into Hughes by chance once again on his second day in New York, where Ellison was staying at the Harlem YMCA. Hughes not only took an interest in him and suggested helpful reading material, but also introduced Ellison to Richard Wright, at that time an up-and-coming black intellectual and fiction writer who would soon produce Native Son, one of the most important novels by any African-American author.

Wright helped Ellison find employment, encouraged him to write, published his work, discussed ideas with him, and in general provided a valuable role model for the ambitious young man. By this time, Ellison had decided that his main interest lay not in composing or sculpting but in writing, and particularly in writing fiction. As with Wright and Hughes, his politics had become leftwing and he was even involved for a time with the Communist Party (as many intellectuals were during the 1930s, partly in response to the economic ravages of the Great Depression). Ellison began his career as a writer by publishing book reviews and essays and by doing research and writing for the Federal Writers’ Project, but it was not long before he produced short stories and tentatively planned to write a novel.

The death of his mother in 1937, however, was a major blow; although he had sometimes lost touch with her, Ellison revered her memory for the rest of his life: She had always been a major source of emotional encouragement for him, even keeping him financially afloat (especially during his time in college). It was not long after losing his mother, however, that he also found a wife: On September 16, 1938, he married a young black actress named Rose Poindexter. Although their relationship would not last, at first they were content.

Ellison’s first published story (“Slick Gonna Learn”) appeared in 1939; soon a second tale (“The Birthmark”) was not only published in a Leftist magazine, but also selected for inclusion in an anthology, The Best Stories of1940. By 1942 Ellison, whose profile was rising, had become managing editor of the Negro Quarterly, where he was in a position to commission work by other aspiring writers. Ellison’s career as an increasingly prominent man of letters was interrupted by his need to take part in the war effort after the United States became involved in World War II. He had no interest in serving in the segregated army, and so he joined the Merchant Marine service, making risky voyages across the submarine-infested Atlantic to deliver supplies to allied forces in Europe.

He continued to write during this time, publishing two of his most notable short stories—“King of the Bingo Game” and “Flying Home”—in 1944. The latter work was related to a novel on which Ellison was also working at this time—a novel he never finished and one that he soon abandoned in favor of the new project that would eventually become Invisible Man. He was at work on this new book by 1945. By this time he had been divorced by Rose, partly as a result of his affair with a married woman, Fanny Buford. Fanny, too, was soon divorced, and on August 28, 1946, Ralph and she married. Though their marriage was troubled almost from the start, it endured for almost 50 years, generally satisfying both of them (especially in its final decades). Fanny was bright, articulate, and skilled at earning a living when Ralph needed her support and totally devoted to Ralph’s career.

Work on Invisible Man proceeded more slowly than Ellison had anticipated, but by 1947 the famous “battle royal” section was published separately as a magazine article. Eventually, in 1952, the entire book appeared. White reviewers tended to be extremely enthusiastic in their praise; despite some reservations, many whites considered the book the best novel yet published by an African-American author, and indeed some immediately ranked it among the best American novels by writers of any background. Black commentators, ironically, tended to be less enthused: Many saw the book as being full of unhelpful stereotypes and thought that it offered a severely limited depiction of the black American experience. Enthusiasts of the novel were vindicated, however, when Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, beating Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

From that point forward, Ellison was widely considered the most promising black novelist in the country, and awards, prizes, and appointments came his way with gratifying regularity. In 1954, for instance, he won a Rockefeller Foundation Award, and in 1955-56 he received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He traveled and lectured in Europe, Japan, and the Indian subcontinent. Throughout this period and despite marital troubles resulting from a serious affair with a woman he met in Rome, Ellison was hard at work on a second novel, which he hoped would solidify his reputation as the best black writer in America and perhaps the world.

He produced essays, taught at colleges, served on various boards, and published stories derived from his growing manuscript, but the novel itself remained unfinished. Ellison was a perfectionist, and undoubtedly he felt enormous pressure to live up to the extremely high standards he had set for himself by producing Invisible Man. The renown that book had achieved continued to grow as the years passed; in 1965, for instance, it was selected by Book Week magazine as the best American novel published after World War II. Ellison was gratified, but he also must have wondered whether he could ever equal (let alone surpass) the success of his first book.

In 1967 a fire at one of his homes destroyed part of the manuscript on which he had been working, but the destructiveness of the blaze has sometimes been exaggerated (apparently more of the second book survived than Ellison sometimes claimed). In any case, the reading public continued to wait—and wait—for his new work to appear. Meanwhile, Ellison enjoyed a prosperous and prominent existence. In 1969 he received the Medal of Freedom from President Johnson; in 1970 he was made a chevalier de l’Order des Arts et Lettres by the French government, and in the same year he was appointed to a prestigious position at New York University. By this time, too, however, Ellison had also come under increasing attack by younger, more radical black intellectuals.

During a time of great racial and civil turmoil—with the country torn apart by racial unrest and disagreements over the Vietnam War—Ellison saw himself as a moderate but was thought by many to be conservative, even reactionary. A proud man and a somewhat aloof figure, Ellison seemed increasingly cut off (by himself and by others) from the main currents of African- American life in the United States. He moved comfortably among the predominantly white elite and tried to promote the interests of his people from his new place of prominence, but he rejected the radicalism of black nationalists and others. He considered his chief obligation to be one of honing and polishing his art. Meanwhile, work on the second novel continued, and continued, and continued.

A small portion of the book was published in 1973, and two years later Ellison was honored again by being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He had already been elected or appointed to numerous other important organizations, and he continued to receive honorary degrees and other forms of public recognition. In 1986 he published a new collection of essays, but still no second novel appeared. By this time, Ellison had become the butt of jokes in some circles; he had joined that small but intriguing list of significant American authors who launch their careers with a major success and then never quite fulfill the promise suggested by their first books. (Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is one example; J. D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, is another.)

In the final years of Ellison’s life, he had become almost as famous for not producing a second novel as he had been for producing his first one, and when he died on April 16, 1994, the second book had still not appeared. Ellison, though, had left behind a huge stack of manuscript pages, and from this pile his friend and literary executor, John F. Callahan, assembled (with the approval of Ellison’s widow) a novel titled Juneteenth, published in 1999 to decidedly mixed reviews. Because this novel included only a small portion of the unpublished manuscript Ellison had spent decades producing, there is a great likelihood that more of his later writings will eventually be published. It seems unlikely, however, that any subsequent publication will ever achieve the fame and respect generated in 1952 by Invisible Man.