RALPH ELLISON

Named after Emerson, Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma on March 1, 1914. At that time, Oklahoma was a strange mix of southern and frontier culture, but it was also a place where there was a strong and fiercely independent black community. Whites, blacks, and Native Americans mixed freely. Like Camus, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Unamuno, Ellison lost his bright and energetic father when he was very young. Though the family was poor, his mother was intellectually vibrant and socially active and did everything she could do to nurture the minds of her two sons, Ralph and Henry.

At an early age, Ellison was a passionate jazz buff and an accomplished trumpet player. He earned a scholarship to study music and music theory at Tuskegee Institute. Late in his undergraduate studies, there was a mix-up with his scholarship, and Ellison moved to New York to try to earn money for school by working as a musician. However, it was high noon in the Great Depression, and trumpet players were not in much demand. Ellison found work as a clerk and receptionist with a psychiatrist in Harlem.

During this time, Ellison struck up intense and important friendships with Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. In addition to his classic, Native Son, Wright had penned the existential novel The Outsider. He encouraged Ellison to write and helped bring him under the spell of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. Wright was also instrumental in getting Ellison hired by the Federal Writing Project. In 1938, Ellison was commissioned by the project to conduct a series of interviews with African Americans. Many of the words that he recorded would later resonate in his fiction.

With the support of Wright and others, Ellison began publishing in the late 1930s. In 1942, he became managing editor of the Negro Quarterly. He wanted to aid in the war effort but not, as he put it, “in a Jim Crow way,” so from 1943–45, Ellison signed on as a cook in the Merchant Marines. In 1945, while on a sick leave, Ellison began the work that would make him a very visible figure in the literary world, Invisible Man. The book, which was published in 1952, won the National Book Award and has become widely regarded as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century.

After securing his literary station, Ellison taught at Bard, Rutgers, the University of Chicago, and other institutions of higher learning. He published many essays and worked endlessly on his second novel but never finished it to his satisfaction. Constructed from the work in progress, Juneteenth was published after Ellison’s death on April 16, 1994.

As an established author, Ellison was always getting into trouble for insisting that there was no separate African-American identity; rather, “we are all notes in a long and improvised tune that draws from many sources white, black, and native American.” Ironically enough, however, Ellison’s identity as an African-American author is so strong that it has been convenient for scholars to forget that his work is also squarely in the existential tradition. Ellison wrote, “The problem of becoming an artist is related to that of becoming a man, of becoming visible.” Like Camus, whom he read closely, Ellison was consumed with the task of trying to find an authentic way of being in an absurd world. And if that task does not bespeak an existential frame of mind, then nothing does.