Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. - Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914[1] – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born inOklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wroteShadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986).


Ralph Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson,[2] was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. Research by Lawrence Jackson, one of Ellison's biographers, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought. He had one brother named Herbert Millsap Ellison, who was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died when Ralph was three years old from stomach ulcers he received from an ice-delivering accident.[2] Many years later, Ellison would find out that his father hoped he would grow up to be a poet.

In 1933, Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor William L. Dawson. Ellison also had the good fortune to come under the close tutelage of the piano instructor Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent increasing amounts of time in the library, reading up on modernist classics. He specifically cited reading The Waste Land as a major awakening moment for him.