Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison grew up in Oklahoma, studied music at Tuskegee, and came to New York in 1936, where Richard Wright set him writing. Invisible Man of 1952, the story of a nameless Black narrator’s journey from a Southern college through Harlem and the Brotherhood to an underground room lit by stolen electricity, won the National Book Award and was named the most important American novel since the war. He published no second novel in the forty-two remaining years of his life, though he worked on one; the essays in Shadow and Act are the other half of his achievement.