Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913[a] – April 16, 1994) was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.

When she did not find a job and her brother lost his, the family returned to Oklahoma, where Ellison worked as a busboy, a shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, and a dentist's assistant.

He worked for a year, and found the money to make a down payment on a trumpet, using it to play with local musicians, and to take further music lessons.

[7] Ellison's outsider position at Tuskegee "sharpened his satirical lens," critic Hilton Als believes: "Standing apart from the university's air of sanctimonious Negritude enabled him to write about it."

"[7] Through Sprague, Ellison became familiar with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, identifying with the "brilliant, tortured anti-heroes" of those works.

[7] As a child, Ellison evidenced what would become a lifelong interest in audio technology, starting by taking apart and rebuilding radios, and later moving on to constructing and customizing elaborate hi-fi stereo systems as an adult.

[6] Desiring to study sculpture, he moved to New York City on July 5, 1936, and found lodging at a YMCA on 135th Street in Harlem, then "the culture capital of black America".

[7] He met Langston Hughes, "Harlem's unofficial diplomat" of the Depression era, and one—as one of the country's celebrity black authors—who could live from his writing.

In a letter to Wright, dated August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. ...

In biographer Arnold Rampersad's assessment of Ellison's taste in women, he was searching for one "physically attractive and smart who would love, honor, and obey him—but not challenge his intellect.

In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware.

In 1962, the futurist Herman Kahn recruited Ellison as a consultant to the Hudson Institute in an attempt to broaden its scope beyond defense-related research.

The following year, a Book Week poll of 200 critics, authors, and editors was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War II.

[17] In 1967, 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.

[19] Ellison died on April 16, 1994, of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum[20] in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.

[12]: 70–72  In 1955 he 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.

[22] Later, Warren would interview Ellison about his thoughts on race, history, and the Civil Rights Movement for his book Who Speaks for the Negro?

[23] In 1958, 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.

Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work.

[24][25] In 1986, 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 and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.

[27] All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively on January 26, 2010, by Modern Library, under the title Three Days Before the Shooting...[28] On February 18, 2014, the USPS issued a 91¢ stamp honoring Ralph Ellison in its Literary Arts series.