Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913 or 1914, depending on the source, and grew up in its Deep Deuce neighborhood. He went to Tuskegee Institute to study music. The turn toward writing came in the late 1930s, when Richard Wright invited him to review a book and then urged him to try fiction. Ellison served in the Merchant Marine during World War II, later taught at Bard College and other universities, and died in New York in 1994.

His subject is American identity: who gets seen, who gets overlooked, and what a person does about it. The fiction draws on a Southern youth and a move north to Harlem. The essays, gathered in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), cover literature and public life with the same patience.

Invisible Man appeared in 1952 and won the 1953 National Book Award. It was the only novel he finished in his lifetime. In 1965 a New York Herald Tribune Book Week poll named it the most distinguished American novel since the war. Ellison received the National Medal of Arts in 1985 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and France made him a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1970. A second novel occupied him for decades and stayed unfinished. His literary executor, John F. Callahan, edited the shortened Juneteenth (1999) and later Three Days Before the Shooting... Flying Home and Other Stories followed in 1996.

Start with Invisible Man. It follows a nameless narrator from the segregated South of the 1920s to Harlem, and it is the book that made his name. If you want to hear him explain himself, read Shadow and Act next.