Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
List Price: $10.00
Pages: 608
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0679732764
Publisher: Vintage
Ralph Ellison was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, the son of Lewis Ellison,
a construction worker, and his wife, Ida, a domestic. He was introduced
to literature by his mother, who used to bring him books she borrowed
from the homes she cleaned. A further exposure was provided by the ironies
of segregation: in the 1920s, Oklahoma City had no black library, and
books from the library's main branch were shelved haphazardly in a pool
hall, where the young Ralph might find a volume of fairy tales alongside
one of Freud--with no well-meaning librarian telling him what a child
ought or ought not to be reading.
Ellison attended Alabama's
Tuskegee Institute on a music scholarship, but in 1936 he moved to New
York City, where he began writing short stories while supporting himself
as a free-lance photographer and audio engineer. After serving in the
Merchant Marine during World War II, he spent seven years writing Invisible
Man, working out of an office located at the back of a jewelry store
on Fifth Avenue. The book was published in 1952 and was awarded the National
Book Award. It has been translated into seventeen languages.
The manuscript of Ellison's
second novel was destroyed by a fire in 1967. He spent the remaining years
of his life painstakingly reconstructing it, while publishing two volumes
of nonfiction, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory
(1986). He taught and lectured widely, was appointed to the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, served on the National Council on the Arts and Humanities
and the Carnegie Commission on public television, and was a trustee of
the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Ralph Ellison died
of cancer on April 16, 1994, at his home in New York City.
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