Ralph Ellison






Ralph Ellison

author profile


born
March 01, 1913

died
April 16, 1994

gender
male

place of birth
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, The United States

influences
Hemingway, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Louis Armstrong, Richard Wright, Twain, Faulkner, Henry James, Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot


about this author

Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913[1] – April 16, 1994) was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man (ISBN 0-679-60139-2), which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). Research by Lawrence Jackson, one of Ellison's biographers, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought.




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avg rating: 3.95 | 17,564 ratings | 1,137 reviews | 17 distinct works | 18 fans
Invisible Man Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 3.95 — 16,355 ratings — published 1952
41 editions
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Juneteenth: A Novel Juneteenth: A Novel
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 3.45 — 214 ratings — published 1999
6 editions
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Flying Home: and Other Stories Flying Home: and Other Stories
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 3.92 — 95 ratings — published 1996
4 editions
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Shadow and Act Shadow and Act
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 4.15 — 80 ratings — published 1995
2 editions
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The Collected Essays of Ralph... The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 4.31 — 59 ratings — published 1995
2 editions
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Living with Music: Ralph Ellis... Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 3.89 — 45 ratings — published 2001
2 editions
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Going to the Territory Going to the Territory
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 4.30 — 20 ratings — published 1986
3 editions
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Trading Twelves: The Selected... Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 3.94 — 17 ratings — published 2000
2 editions
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Conversations With Ralph Ellis... Conversations With Ralph Ellison (Literary Conversations Series)
by Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham (Editor), Amritjit Singh (Editor)
avg rating 4.10 — 10 ratings — published 1995
2 editions
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Invisible Man Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
avg rating 3.62 — 8 ratings — published 1952
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"I am an invisible man....I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man)
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"And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others."
Ralph Ellison
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"It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been borht with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!"
Ralph Ellison
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