Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Okla., on March 1, 1914. He was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19th-century essayist, by his father, a construction worker and avid reader. His father died when he was 3, leaving his mother to support herself, Ralph, and her younger son as a domestic worker. As a boy Ralph was interested in music and reading, and his mother brought home records, books, and magazines that her employers had discarded. At the age of 8 he began to play the trumpet, and growing up in Oklahoma City he became friends with the jazz musician Hot Lips Page and the blues singer Jimmy Rushing. Later, Ellison studied classical music at Tuskegee Institute under the African American composer William Dawson and became an accomplished trumpeter.

In 1936, while a junior at Tuskegee, Ellison visited New York City to study sculpture and to work in the Federal Writers' Project. There he met the black authors Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, who inspired him to become a writer. In 1937 Ellison moved to New York City to write, and he was soon contributing essays, short stories, and articles to several publications, many with a leftist bent. In the early 1940s he helped to found and edit the short-lived Negro Quarterly.

After serving in the Merchant Marine during World War II, Ellison spent the next seven years working on ‘Invisible Man'. The novel, partly autobiographical, deals with a naive young black man who suffers brutal and humiliating experiences in the South and in Harlem. Stripped of his illusions as he finds himself alternately manipulated and ignored, he ultimately acknowledges his “invisibility,” and withdraws from society to try to form a new identity that will allow him to live as a self-respecting black. Although ‘Invisible Man' offered penetrating insights into the African American experience, Ellison emphasized the universality of the theme of identity: in the novel's closing line, the nameless narrator asks rhetorically, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

Ellison's other full-length works, ‘Shadow and Act' (1964) and ‘Going to the Territory' (1986), were collections of personal and cultural essays and interviews. Ellison advocated that African Americans study and honor their history and culture as a way of freeing themselves from stereotypes imposed upon them. Like his novel, many of Ellison's short stories, including the widely anthologized ‘Flying Home' and ‘King of the Bingo Game' (both 1944), explored the relationship of African Americans to their heritage and the place of blacks in white society. Although committed throughout his life to establishing freedom for blacks in America, Ellison considered himself an integrationist rather than a separatist, which put him at odds ideologically with vocal black nationalists of the 1960s.

Beginning in the 1950s, Ellison lectured widely on black culture, folklore, and creative writing and taught at several American colleges and universities. He received many honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the National Medal of Arts in 1985, and he became a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters and of the Institute for Jazz Studies. After a fire destroyed much of the manuscript of a highly anticipated second novel in 1967, Ellison spent the remaining years of his life painstakingly attempting to recreate his work. Excerpts from the novel in progress were published in journals during the 1960s and 1970s, but the project was left unfinished at his death on April 16, 1994, in New York City. The following year saw the publication of ‘The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison' (1995), which included the contents of ‘Shadow and Act' and ‘Going to the Territory' along with a number of previously uncollected and newly discovered essays and interviews. ‘Flying Home and Other Stories' (1996) collected 13 short stories written between 1937 and 1954, six of which were previously unpublished.