But insight comes hard, and it forces him to retreat, into a cellar garishly illuminated with blinding light-bulbs run on electricity stolen from the power company. He learns from his experiences at a black college, as an industrial worker, and as a political activist. The main character, in this bildungsroman, is unformed at first, a creature of naïve illusions. The “Invisible Man” of the title served as a powerful metaphor for the black and human condition. The book won Ellison the National Book Award. The final product, Invisible Man, published in 1952, brimmed with experimental technique, wry humor, and energy. Like his friend and initial mentor Richard Wright, Ellison came to chafe at the political discipline imposed by the party, and he had by the 1940s separated himself from it.Īfter a stint in the Merchant Marine during the Second World War, and after having published pieces in various communist-affiliated journals, Ellison set himself to the task of writing an important novel that would capture the reality of African American life in all of its complexity while also appealing to the universal experiences of humanity. During the period of the 1930s, Ellison was associated with the Communist Party, when that organization appeared for many African Americans as a natural ally in the fight for civil rights and as supportive of black writers. Possessed with tremendous confidence, Ellison quickly made friends with some of the leading lights in the African American literary constellation. Like many young black men with literary aspirations, Ellison headed to Harlem, New York in 1936, to make it as a writer. While Ellison learned much about music at the school, he also spent an immense amount of time and energy devouring modern literature at the school library. When an opportunity arose for Ralph to escape from home, he jumped at it, enrolling in 1933 as a music student at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His mother worked long and hard to insure that Ralph Ellison had an education, but the family existed in precarious economic circumstances. Many of the initial comforts enjoyed by Ellison vanished when his father died in 1916. But his road to and in literature would be torturous. Born on Main Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Ralph Waldo Ellison entered the world with a name that almost presumed for him a literary career.

Ralph waldo ellison