Ralph Waldo Ellison
(1914-1994)
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City of
parents who migrated from South Carolina and Georgia. His father, Lewis, a
construction foreman and later the owner of a small ice and coal business,
named his son after Emerson, hoping he would be a poet. After losing his father
when he was three, Ellison and his younger brother, Herbert, were raised by
their mother, Ida, who worked as a nursemaid, janitress, and domestic and was
active in politics. Ellison used to enjoy telling how she had canvassed for
Eugene V. Debs and other Socialist candidates and later been jailed for defying
Oklahoma City’s segregation ordinances.
Ellison
was drawn to music, playing cornet and trumpet from an early age and, in 1933,
going to study classical composition at Tuskegee Institute under William L.
Dawson. Of his musical influences he later said, “The great emphasis in my
school was upon classical music, but such great jazz musicians as Hot Lips
Page, Jimmy Rushing, and Lester Young were living in Oklahoma City....As it
turned out, the perfection, the artistic dedication which helped me as a
writer, was not so much in the classical emphasis as in the jazz itself.”
In
July 1936, after his junior year at Tuskegee, Ellison went to New York to earn
money for his senior year and to study music and sculpture, and he stayed. In
June 1937 his friendship with Richard Wright began and led him toward becoming
a writer. Ellison also made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes and the painter
Romare Bearden. In Dayton, Ohio, where he went to visit his ailing mother, and
remained for six months after her unexpected death in October 1937, he began to
write seriously, mostly nights in the second-story law office of Attorney
William O. Stokes, using Stokes’s letterhead and typewriter.
Returning
to New York, from 1938 until 1942 Ellison worked on the New York Federal
Writers Project of the WPA. Starting in the late 1930s, he contributed reviews,
essays, and short fiction to New Masses, Tomorrow, The Negro Quarterly (of
which he was for a time managing editor), The New Republic, The Saturday
Review, Antioch Review, The Reporter, and other periodicals. During World War
II he served in the merchant marine as a cook and baker and afterward worked at
a variety of jobs, including freelance photography and the building and
installation of audio systems.
Over
a period of seven years, Ellison wrote Invisible Man, which was recognized upon
its publication in 1952 as one of the most important works of fiction of its
time. It was on the best-seller list for sixteen weeks and won the National
Book Award. Its critical reputation and popularity have only continued to grow
in the more than four decades since its publication. Ellison has described his
novel’s structure as that of a symphonic jazz composition with a central theme
(or bass line) and harmonic variations (or riffs) often expressed in virtuoso
solo performances. Invisible Man speaks for all readers and reflects the
contradictions and complexities of American life through the prism of African
American experience.
Although
an excerpt from a second novel was published in Noble Savage in 1960, and seven
other selections in literary magazines between then and 1977, no other long
work of fiction has yet appeared. Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the
Territory (1986) collect essays and interviews written over more than forty
years. Since Ellison’s death four posthumous works have appeared: The Collected
Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), Conversations with Ralph Ellison (1995), Flying
Home and Other Stories (1996), and Juneteenth (1999).
“A
Party Down at the Square” (undated), unpublished in Ellison’s lifetime, is a
tour de force. By narrating a lynching in the voice of a Cincinnati white boy
visiting his uncle in Alabama, Ellison, while still a young writer, crosses the
narrative color line and defies the “segregation of the word” he found
lingering in American literature when he wrote “Twentieth-Century Fiction and
the Black Mask of Humanity” (1946). Ellison’s technique in “A Party Down at the
Square” compels readers to experience the human condition in extremis, mediated
by a stranger whose morality is a commitment to be non-commital. The white
boy’s most telling response comes from his insides when, to his shame, he
throws up. His sensations signify a resistance to values he has been taught not
to question. There is nothing like this story in the rest of Ellison’s work.
“Flying
Home” (1944) anticipates the theme of invisibility and the technique of solos
and breaks with which Ellison took flight in Invisible Man. Just when Todd,
Ellison’s northern protagonist, believes that he has learned to use his wiles
to escape the limitations of race, language, and geography, circumstances force
him to confront the strange “old country” of the South. A literary descendant
of Icarus, as well as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Todd, one of the black eagles
from the Negro air school at Tuskegee, flies too close to the sun, collides
with a buzzard (a “jimcrow”), and falls to earth in rural Alabama. There, he is
saved by Jefferson, whose folktales and actions enable Todd to recognize where he
is and who he is and to come back to life by following the old black peasant
and his son out of a labyrinthine Alabama valley.
In
“Brave Words for a Startling Occasion” (1953), Ellison’s acceptance address for
the National Book Award, he celebrates the richness and diversity of American
speech and the American language. And he identifies the task of the American
writer as “always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed
manners and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad,
vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight,
its truth.”
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