Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novel writer, literary critic, scholar and author. He started life in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is well known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Prize in 1953. He also created Shadow and Act , a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory.
Ralph Ellison, called after Ralph Waldo Emerson, started life in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. Research by Lawrence Jackson, one of Ellison's biographers, has established that he started life a year earlier than had been previously thought. He had one brother called Herbert Millsap Ellison, who started life in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, passed away when Ralph was three years old from stomach ulcers he received from an ice-delivering accident. Many years later, Ellison would find out that his dad hoped he would grow up to be a poet.
(Ralph Ellison photo #2)
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 colledge, headed by the conductor William L. Dawson. Ellison also had the good 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 reading The Waste Land as a major awakening moment for him.
Ralph Ellison
