Happy Birthday, Ralph Ellison

Born March 1, 1913, Oklahoma City, OK | Died April 16, 1994, New York, NY

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates novelist, essayist, and musician Ralph Ellison on the 112th anniversary of his birth. Best known for his National Book Award winning novel, Invisible Man, Ellison was also a prolific writer of essays and criticism. He received numerous awards for his work, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a National Medal of Arts, and admission into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Ralph Ellison, 1950, Fanny Ellison.

“So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget,’ and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?”

Ralph Ellison, 1961. Photographer unknown.

“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.”

Invisible Man (1952) remains Ellison’s best known and massively influential work. Shadow and Act (1964) collects many of the essays Ellison had written to that point, largely about his political activism and personal history. Living with Music (2002), published posthumously, is a collection of Ellison’s essays about jazz.

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First published essay:

• "Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," Confluence, 1953.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan, Modern Library, 2024.

• Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, Modern Library, 2002.

Essay by Ralph Ellison listed in Notables (N) in The Best American Essays:

• “On Being the Target of Discrimination,” New York Times Magazine, 1989 (BAE 1990, N).

See also:

Visit the Ralph Ellison Foundation.

Listen to The Lightbulb Podcast, produced by the Ralph Ellison Foundation.

Watch this recorded interview with Ralph Ellison.

Read “Justice for Ralph Ellison” by David Denby in The New Yorker, 2012.

Read “Frequencies of Memory: A Eulogy for Ralph Waldo Ellison” by John Callahan, Callaloo, 1995, listed in Notables in BAE 1996.

Read Ellison’s commencement speech for the Curtis Institute of Music, 1975.

Read “Ralph Ellison, The Art of Fiction No. 8,” The Paris Review, 1955.