Invisible Man Ralph Ellison Research Paper

Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913[1] – 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 (ISBN 0-679-60139-2), 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, Ellison's biographer, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought.
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* 1 Early Life * 2 College * 3 New York * 4 Writings * 5 Notes * 6 External links

[edit] Early Life

Ellison was born in Oklahoma City,
In 1958, he returned to the United States to take a position teaching American & Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth.

In 1964, Ellison published Shadow And Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Rutgers and Yale, and continued to work on his novel. The following year, a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed Invisible Man as the most important novel since World War II.

In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, where he lost 300 pages of his second novel manuscript. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man, that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel," and despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book. The loss of his manuscript pages was devastating to him, and while he ultimately wrote over 2000 pages, the book would not be completed in his
In 1969, he received the Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was awarded the coveted Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, acting from 1970-1980.

In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy for the Arts and Letters and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medallion. The following year saw the publication of Going to the Territory, a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and his friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.

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