Skip to content
Ralph Ellison

File:Ralph_Ellison_photo_portrait_seated.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

EntityQ299965· pop 51· linked from 555 articles

Ralph Ellison

Sign in to save

Also known as Ralph Waldo Ellison

American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer (1914-1994)

Person · Open Library

Born
1 March 1914
Died
16 April 1994
Works
35

Top works

  • The United States in Literature [with three long stories] -- Seventh Edition
  • Words of Ages
  • Prentice Hall Literature--The American Experience
  • Juneteenth (Revised)
  • Invisible Man

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Country
US
Active from
1934-05-27
Active to
2018-06-28

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
194
Total plays
5,764

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994) was a novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man (ISBN 0-679-60139-2), which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act, a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Ralph+Ellison">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Ralph Ellison

Quotes

  • [T]he painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
  • Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
  • Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.[…] For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy.
  • [T]here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
  • Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.
  • All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
Ralph Waldo Ellison , ( 1913-03-01 ) March 1, 1913, Oklahoma City , Oklahoma, U.S.
Died
April 16, 1994 (1994-04-16) (aged 81), New York City, U.S.
Occupation
Writer
Education
Tuskegee University
Genre
Essay, criticism, novel, short story
Notable works
Invisible Man (1952)
Notable awards
National Book Award (1953) National Medal of Arts (1985)

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image
Ralph Ellison photo portrait seated.jpg
Show 5 more facts
Commons category
Ralph Waldo Ellison
date of birth
1914-03-01
date of death
1994-04-16
name in native language
Ralph Ellison
Sources (7)

via Wikidata · CC0

~17 min read

Article

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.

Ellison wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). The New York Times dubbed him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus".

Gallery (2)

Connections

Categories