Ralph Ellison 1914-1994
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1914, Ralph Ellison was still just a young child when the Harlem Renaissance began to emerge on the national scene, and a teenager when the era had begun to dwindle; however, he was a Renaissance Man in quite another sense--as Gates points out. While still a child he became interested in music, learning to play the trumpet among other instruments. Ellison's artistic interests expanded at Tuskegee Institute, where he discovered a love of literature and applied art. However, his time at Tuskegee was cut short, Gates adds, due to funding, and the fact that Ellison became disillusioned by Tuskegee and found it "anti-intellectual and overly accommodationist." He soon found new horizons in New York, where he was introduced to author Richard Wright. The two writers became friends immediately, and several of Ellison's work was published with Wright's encouragement" (Gates, et al. 1535).
Though Ellison garnered much insight from his working relationship with Wright, the two ultimately differed in terms of philosophy when it came to ideological alliances. Ellison doubted the efficacy of Wright's Marxist Communism--as well as that of the Naturalism Wright frequently employed in his examinations of the self in contest with the world. While Wright's Bigger Thomas was the angry and disaffected product of racism, ignorance and other negative social forces, Ellison's protagonists were formed out of the writer's abiding insistence upon an image of the African American male as educated and erudite. One source observes that "[i]f Wright's characters were angry, uneducated, and inarticulate--the consequences of a society that oppressed them--Ellison's Invisible Man was educated, articulate, and self-aware" ("American Masters" pbs.org). Additionally, while Wright's Naturalist--and Urban Realist approach to understanding the effects of racism on the individual, Ellison's text in Invisible Man ponders the question, "What is the value of self-knowledge?" (1537).
