Ralph Ellison

Died in 1994

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913 (he himself gave 1914), named after Emerson by a father who delivered ice and coal, who died when he was three. He studied the trumpet at the Tuskegee Institute and left for New York in 1936 to earn the money for his final year; he never returned to the institute. He tried his hand at sculpture, then served as a cook in the merchant marine during the war. He would work for forty years on a second novel, which would appear in abridged form after his death. He died in New York in 1994.

In the catalogue 1

NovelInvisible ManRalph Ellison · 1952Literature