The USPS issued a 91¢ stamp honoring Ralph Ellison in its Literary Arts series
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Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.
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culture · American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer (1913–1994) · writer · essayist · novelist · autobiographer · literary critic · music critic · journalist · prose writer · critic · literary scholar · also Ralph Ellison, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Ellison
Born 1 March 1914 · Died 16 April 1994 · Q299965
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2014· 1 entry
2010· 1 entry
By Modern Library, under the title Three Days Before the Shooting
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1999· 1 entry
His second novel, Juneteenth, was published under the editorship of John F
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1994· 3 entries
Of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan
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Died 1994-04-16.
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“I am a novelist, not an activist... But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As an individual, I am primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to make sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap.”
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1992· 2 entries
Awarded Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (1992).
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Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards; his artistic achievements included work as a sculptor, musician, photographer, and college professor as well as his writing output
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1986· 1 entry
His Going to the Territory was published; this is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison's friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington
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1985· 1 entry
Was awarded the National Medal of Arts
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1984· 2 entries
Won Langston Hughes Medal (1984).
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Received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medal
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1978· 1 entry
“The Little Man at Chehaw Station”
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1975· 1 entry
Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library
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1974· 1 entry
“Address to the Harvard College Alumni, Class of 1949”
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1969· 2 entries
Won Presidential Medal of Freedom presented by Lyndon B. Johnson (1969).
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Received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert
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1967· 1 entry
Ellison experienced a major house fire at his summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost
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1964· 1 entry
Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Bard College, Rutgers University and Yale University, while continuing to work on his novel
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1963· 1 entry
“What These Children Are Like”
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1962· 1 entry
The futurist Herman Kahn recruited Ellison as a consultant to the Hudson Institute in an attempt to broaden its scope beyond defense-related research
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1958· 3 entries
Ellison returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth
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“Some Questions and Some Answers”
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“Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”
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1957· 1 entry
“Society, Morality and the Novel”
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1955· 1 entry
Traveled to Europe, visiting and lecturing, settling for a time in Rome, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a 1957 Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest
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1953· 3 entries
Awarded National Book Award for Invisible Man (1953).
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“Brave Words for a Startling Occasion”
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“Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity”
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1952· 1 entry
Invisible Man explores the theme of a person's search for their identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African-American man, first in the Deep South and then
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1948· 1 entry
"Harlem is Nowhere", on the first racially integrated psychiatric clinic called Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, along with other photography projects over the years
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1946· 2 entries
Ellison composed and wrote the lyrics for at least two songs, "Flirty" and "It Would Only Hurt Me If I Knew"
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Married Fanny McConnell, an accomplished person in her own right: a scholarship graduate of the University of Iowa who was a founder of the Negro People's Theater in Chicago and a writer for The Chicago Defender
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1941· 1 entry
Briefly had an affair with Sanora Babb, which he confessed to his wife afterwards, and in 1943 the marriage was over
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1938· 1 entry
Ellison met Rose Araminta Poindexter, a woman two years his senior
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1936· 1 entry
And found lodging at a YMCA on 135th Street in Harlem, then "the culture capital of black America"
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1934· 1 entry
Began to work as a desk clerk at the university library, where he read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein
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1933· 1 entry
Because the orchestra needed a trumpet player
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1921· 1 entry
Ellison's mother and her children moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother
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1916· 1 entry
After work-related injury and a failed operation
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1914· 1 entry
Born 1914-03-01.
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