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Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994) was an African-American novelist, literary...

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994) was an African-American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 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. Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. He had one brother named Herbert Millsap Ellison, who was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died when Ralph was three years old. Many years later, Ellison would find out that his father hoped he would grow up to be a poet. In 1933, Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor Charles L. Dawson. Ellison also had the good fortune to come under the close tutelage of