Ralph Ellison - Three Days Before the Shooting . . . (Modern Library Paperbacks)

R ALPH W ALDO E LLISON WAS born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1913. His father, a construction foreman and later the owner of a small ice-and-coal business, died when his son was three. Ellison and his younger brother, Herbert, were raised by their mother, who worked as a nursemaid, janitor, and domestic, and was active in politics. As a child he was drawn to music, playing trumpet from an early age and studying classical composition at Tuskegee Institute under the instruction of William L. Dawson. Of his musical influences he later said: The great emphasis in my school was upon classical music, but such great jazz musicians as Hot Lips Page, Jimmy Rushing, and Lester Young were living in Oklahoma City . As it turned out, the perfection, the artistic dedication which helped me as a writer, was not so much in the classical emphasis as in the jazz itself.

In July 1936, after his junior year at Tuskegee, Ellison went to New York to earn money for his senior year and to study sculpture, and stayed. In June 1937 his friendship with Richard Wright began and led him toward becoming a writer. Ellison also made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes and the painter Romare Bearden, among others. From 1938 until World War II he worked on the New York Federal Writers Project of the WPA. Starting in the late 1930s, he contributed reviews, essays, and short fiction to New Masses, Tomorrow, The Negro Quarterly (of which he was for a time managing editor), The New Republic, Saturday Review, The Antioch Review, Reporter, and other periodicals. During the war he served in the merchant marine, and afterward he worked at a variety of jobs, including freelance photography and the building and installation of audio systems.

Over a period of seven years Ellison wrote Invisible Man, which was recognized upon its publication in 1952 as one of the most important works of fiction of its time. It was on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks and won the National Book Award. Its critical reputation and popularity have only grown in the more than five decades since its publication. Although an excerpt from a second novel was published in the magazine Noble Savage in 1960, and seven other selections in various literary magazines between then and 1977, no other work of fiction appeared under Ellisons name during his lifetime. Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) collect essays and interviews written over more than forty years.

From 1955 to 1957 Ellison was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Returning to the United States, he taught and lectured at a wide range of institutions including Bard College, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Chicago, Rutgers, Harvard, Brown, and Yale. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969; was named a Chevalier de lOrdre des Arts et Lettres in 1970 by the French minister of culture, Andr Malraux; and was given the National Medal of Arts in 1985. He was a charter member of the National Council on the Arts and Humanities, and from 1970 to 1979 was Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at New York University.

After a brief first marriage Ellison married Fanny McConnell in 1946; for more than forty years, until his passing on April 16, 1994, they lived on Riverside Drive in Harlem.

Posthumous editions of Ellisons work, edited and with an introduction by John F. Callahan, include The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995); Flying Home and Other Stories (1996); Juneteenth (1999), the central narrative in the unfinished second novel; and Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), each published by Random House, Inc.