Ralph Ellison

Who Was Ralph Ellison?

Ralph Ellison was the author of one of the most important novels in American literary history and one of the most searching examinations of race, identity, and visibility ever written. Born in Oklahoma City in 1914, he studied music at Tuskegee Institute before moving to New York, where he encountered Richard Wright and began writing fiction. His single completed novel, Invisible Man (1952), won the National Book Award and has never gone out of print.

The novel’s narrator — an unnamed Black man who discovers that American society has rendered him invisible, not through any supernatural agency but through the refusal of white Americans to truly see him — is one of the most resonant figures in American fiction. The novel traces his education in the various forms of this invisibility: the accommodationist program of the Black college, the radical politics of the Brotherhood, the nationalism of Ras the Exhorter, and finally the underground hibernation in which he prepares to emerge.

Ellison is significant for TLA because Invisible Man is one of the books featured in TLA’s essay Image Bearers of Something Eternal, where his narrator’s invisibility is read as a consequence of the denial of the image of God in Black Americans, and the light with which he illuminates his underground is read as a form of the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Invisible Man — 1952
• Shadow and Act — 1964 — essays
• Going to the Territory — 1986 — essays
• Juneteenth — 1999 — posthumous, ed. John Callahan
• Three Days Before the Shooting... — 2010 — full posthumous manuscript