Biography

Ralph Ellison grew up in Oklahoma City and attended college at the Tuskegee Institute, where he was a music major who admired both the classics of the European tradition and Kansas City jazz. After graduation he moved to New York City, where he met Richard Wright and was encouraged to pursue his writing career. Invisible Man (1952), the result of seven years of writing, won the National Book Award and brought Ellison into the national spotlight. Critics disagreed about whether the book made a statement about African Americans, but Ellison felt both sides had missed the point. He had never aimed to be a spokesperson and asked to be judged simply as a writer. After the outstanding success of Invisible Man, Ellison began teaching university courses, and from 1970 until retirement he was the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His prose essays are collected in Shadow and Act (1964).

Explorations

Invisible Man is in some ways an autobiographical novel, based on Ellison's own experiences at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Communist Party was a major presence in the civil rights movement. However, as a young writer proficient in literary modernism and Anglo-American cultural history, Ellison wrote a book which echoed and conversed with a host of forebears. Joyce is here, and Hawthorne and Emerson, and Clemens, and the European surrealists and dadaists -- the list is very long. Invisible Man can be appreciated and deeply felt much more easily than it can be categorized: such intractability to categorization is one of the qualities of a great novel.

1. Invisible Man begins with a man in a hole in the ground in Harlem, a hole with hundreds of blazing lights and electricity diverted from a company called Monopolated Light and Power. How would you describe the mode of this opening: as realistic? surrealistic? satirical? fantastic? How does this prologue influence the way that we being to read chapter 1, about the "battle royal"? Is there a fundamental change in the way that the story is being told? If so, describe that change.

2. Before our narrator can give his speech to the white audience and receive his scholarship, he is forced to undergo a series of humiliations. What are these, and what larger significance might they have?

3. At a crisis moment in the chapter, the narrator apologizes to an angered crowd by saying that he was "swallowing blood." What does he mean by that, at this particular moment? How might a novel that addresses the African American experience, but that interacts with a mainstream white literary tradition, also be an act of "swallowing blood"? How might this be a commentary on the predicament of a minority writer in Ellison's historical moment?

Other sites to consult:

• Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. An excellent resource page from Al Filreis's Literature and Culture of the American 1950s site at the University of Pennsylvania. Includes Irving Howe's 1963 essay on Ellison, Baldwin, and Wright; Saul Bellow's and Irving Howe's 1952 reviews of Invisible Man; a profile of Ellison in a 1970 edition of Black World; and a chapter summary of Invisible Man.
• "Decoding Ralph Ellison". An essay by Gerald Early concerning Ellison's writing career after Invisible Man. (DISSENT, Summer 1997, vol. 44, no. 3.)
• "Invincible Man Ralph Ellison 1914-1994". An obituary of Ellison by Richard Corliss. (From Time, 4/25/94 vol. 143, no. 17.)