Special thanks to FranklinBarnes for the recommendation!
❝ Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.❞
–– Ralph Ellison, Invisible man
Ralph Ellison, in full Ralph Waldo Ellison, born on March 1, 1914, Oklahoma, U.S. was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus."
Ellison's outsider position at Tuskegee "sharpened his satirical lens," critic Hilton Als believes: "Standing apart from the university's air of sanctimonious Negritude enabled him to write about it." Desiring to study sculpture, he moved to New York City where it was Wright encouraged him to write fiction as a career. His first published story was "Hymie's Bull," inspired by Ellison's 1933 hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, Ellison had over 20 book reviews, as well as short stories and articles, published in magazines such as New Challenge and The New Masses.
Following service in World War II, he produced Invisible Man, which won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction. The story is a bildungsroman that tells of a naive and idealistic (and, significantly, nameless) Southern Black youth who goes to Harlem, joins the fight against white oppression, and ends up ignored by his fellow Blacks as well as by whites. The novel won praise for its stylistic innovations in infusing classic literary motifs with modern Black speech and culture, while providing a thoroughly unique take on the construction of contemporary African American identity. However, Ellison's treatment of his novel as first and foremost a work of art—as opposed to a primarily polemical work—led to some complaints from his fellow Black novelists at the time that he was not sufficiently devoted to social change.
After Invisible Man appeared, Ellison published only two collections of essays: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). He lectured widely on Black culture, folklore, and creative writing and taught at various American colleges and universities. Flying Home, and Other Stories was published posthumously in 1996. He left a second novel unfinished at his death; it was published, in a much-shortened form, as Juneteenth in 1999. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison was released in 2019.
Ellison died on April 16, 1994, of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.
Discussion Questions:
1. In the Invisible man, the narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation.
Have you read the novel "Invisible man"? What are your views about the distinct writing style of Ellison, as contrast to his contemporaries?
2. What are some of the thought-provoking works you've read and did any of them change your common perspective over something in particular?
Always open to additional questions and comments on about Ralph Ellison and his works.
If there is another author you would like to see a discussion on, please post your suggestion in the comments below for a chance to be featured in a future chapter!
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