Washington, which advocated that blacks should work toward economic success as a means of achieving racial equality. Bledsoe, the novel offers a vehement rejection of the philosophy of Booker T. He also engaged powerfully with the tradition of African-American social debate. Ellison adapted the existentialists’ universal themes to the black experience of oppression and prejudice in America. Existentialism, whose foremost proponents included Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, explored the question of individuality and the nature of meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. Invisible Man was heavily influenced by the work of a number of twentieth-century French writers known as the existentialists. Achieving one of the most sensational debuts of any novel in American history, Invisible Man was hailed by writers such as Saul Bellow and critics such as Irving Howe as a landmark publication some critics claimed that it was the most important American novel to appear after World War II. Rich in symbolism and metaphor, virtuosic in its use of multiple styles and tones, and steeped in the black experience in America and the human struggle for individuality, the novel spent sixteen weeks on the best-seller list and won the National Book Award in 1953. The first chapter appeared in America in the 1948 volume of Magazine of the Year, and the novel was published in its entirety in 1952.Įmploying a shifting, improvisational style directly based on Ellison’s experience of jazz performance, Invisible Man ranges in tone from realism to extreme surrealism, from tragedy to vicious satire to near-slapstick comedy. After the war, Ellison won a Rosenwald Fellowship, which he used to write Invisible Man. After a year editing the Negro Quarterly, Ellison left for the Merchant Marines, in which he served during World War II. Ellison also befriended the eminent jazz writer and sociologist Albert Murray, with whom he carried on a lengthy and important literary correspondence, later collected in the book Trading Twelves. As an employee of the Federal Writers’ Project, Ellison befriended many of the most important African-American writers of the era, including Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. It later served as the model for the black college attended by the narrator in Invisible Man.Įllison left the Tuskegee Institute in 1936 and moved to New York City, where he settled in Harlem. Washington, one of the foremost black educators in American history, and became one of the nation’s most important black colleges. The Institute, which is now called Tuskegee University, was founded in 1881 by Booker T.
In 1933, he left Oklahoma to begin a study of music at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Ellison himself studied the cornet and trumpet, and planned a career as a jazz musician.
As a young man, Ellison developed an abiding interest in jazz music he befriended a group of musicians who played in a regional band called Walter Page’s Blue Devils, many of whom later played with Count Basie’s legendary big band in the late 1930s. His father was a construction worker, and his mother was a domestic servant who also volunteered for the local Socialist Party. The grandson of slaves, Ralph Ellison was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and was raised largely in Tulsa, Oklahoma.