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Other authors named Ralph:
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Author's popularity: 2
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Popularity: 6
Vote: | America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | When I discover who I am, I'll be free. |
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Biography
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Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994) was an African American scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man (ISBN 0679601392), which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986).
In 1933 Ellison entered Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. He had hopes of writing a symphony. Due to financial issues, Ellison was forced to leave Tuskegee after 3 years. In 1936 Ellison moved to New York City where he met Richard Wright. Wright encouraged , Ellison to persue a career in writing rather than a career in music.
From 1937 to 1944 Ellison had over twenty book reviews as well as short stories and articles published in magizines such as New Challenge and New Masses. During WWII Ellison joined the Merchant Marines and married Fanny McConnell in 1946.
The Invisible Man explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and his place in society from the perspective of a black man in the New York City of the 1940’s. In contrast to his contempararies such as Richard Wright, whose charaters were portraid as angry, uneducated and inarticulate, Ellison’s characters in The Invisible Man are educated, articulate and self aware.
Ellison’s Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison has also been awarded the Langston Hughes Medal, the Metal of Freedom, the Rosenwald Grant, the Russwurm Award and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et Lettres. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964) a collection of political, social and critical essays and Going to the Territory (1986).
Ellison was also an accomplished sculptor, musicain and photographer as well as a college professor. Ellison taught at Bard College, Rutgers, the University of Chicago, and New York University.
Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994, and is buried in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.
Five years after his death, under the editorship of John Callahan, a professor at Lewis and Clark College and Ellison's literary executor, Ellison's second novel, Juneteenth (ISBN 0394464575), was published. It was a 368-page condensation of over 2000 pages written over a period of forty years.
Related works *Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (with Albert Murray) (ISBN 0375503676)
*Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (ISBN 0679640347)
*The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995, ISBN 0679601767)
*Flying Home: and Other Stories (1996)
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ralph Ellison".
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