Ralph Ellison Ralph Waldo Ellison was born the grandson of slaves in 1914 in Oklahoma City. He is the author of The Invisible Man (1952), one of the most important and influential postwar American novels. "I blundered into writing," admitted Ellison in a 1961 interview with novelist Richard Stern. From the time he was eight years old, when his mother bought him a used coronet, he wanted to be a musician. He cut grass in exchange for trumpet …
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…experience that became the core theme of Ellison's fiction, culminating in the 1952 masterpiece, The Invisible Man.(4) For more than forty years before his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison lived with his wife, Fanny McConnell, on Riverside Drive in Harlem in New York City. His work is currently undergoing a revival with the 1996 publication of a collection of early Ralph Ellison works, Flying Home and Other Stories and the publication of his novel Juneteenth, released in June 1999.(1)