Ralph Ellison wrote one celebrated novel, then never finished the second
Invisible Man took the National Book Award in 1953, and a poll of 200 critics a dozen years later called it the most important American novel since World War II. Its author, a trained trumpeter who once hopped freight trains to college, then wrote over 2,000 pages of a follow-up he never completed.
Ellison was born in Oklahoma City on March 1, 1913, and named after Ralph Waldo Emerson by a book-loving father who hoped he would become a poet. His father died when he was three after a work injury, and the boy helped support the family as a busboy, shoeshine boy and waiter. Free lessons from a neighbour's father made him a capable trumpeter, and Tuskegee Institute finally admitted him in 1933 because its orchestra needed one. He reached Alabama by riding freight trains.
At Tuskegee he studied music but spent spare hours in the library, where T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land jolted him awake and a library job introduced him to Joyce and Gertrude Stein. An English teacher, Morteza Sprague, steered him to Dostoevsky and Hardy. He left without a degree in 1936 and went to Harlem hoping to study sculpture. There Langston Hughes introduced him around, and Richard Wright, after reading a review Ellison wrote, urged him toward fiction.
Like Wright, Ellison moved in Communist literary circles and then soured on the party during World War II, feeling it had abandoned Black Americans. That disillusion fed Invisible Man, published in 1952. Its unnamed narrator travels from the Deep South to 1930s New York, and he is invisible because people refuse to see him. Unlike many contemporaries, Ellison made his characters cool, educated and articulate, and he contrasted Northern and Southern forms of racism.
His second wife, Fanny McConnell, supported the household and typed his longhand drafts. Afterwards Ellison published the essay collection Shadow and Act in 1964 and taught at Bard, Rutgers and Yale. He tinkered with radios and hi-fi systems all his life and took photographs, collaborating with Gordon Parks on a 1948 Harlem project. A 1967 fire at his Massachusetts summer house, he said, destroyed over 300 pages of the new novel. After his death in 1994, editors shaped his notes into Juneteenth.
Source: Ralph Ellison
