When he enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute in 1933, Ellison intended to study music. However, exposure to literature interested him in writing. In 1936, he left Tuskegee to move to New York City. There he met other black authors, including Richard Wright, and became involved in the Federal Writers Project. Initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt, the project encouraged writing during the Depression when many authors and poets found employment difficult. Ellison published short stories in New Challenge and New Masses. As part of his work for the project, he also recorded the speech of African Americans. He experimented with various methods, and his work greatly affected his later writing of Invisible Man. He wrote of the project, "I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded. I developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect through misspellings." He later borrowed a phrase from one interview with a Pullman porter to use in his novel: "I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me."

When Ellison's Invisible Man appeared in 1952, reaction was strong, and mainly positive. The work proved remarkable as one of the first to describe the black experience in the United States from a black writer's viewpoint. Invisible Man won the National Book Award for fiction in 1953. One statement by the awards committee commented, "Ralph Ellison's impassioned first novel of a Negro rebel in the modern world - 'Invisible Man'-- has a mature literary awareness which the class-conscious novel of the Thirties often lacked: escaping the conventions of realism, it searches -- as the title itself indicates -- for a universal statement of man's condition in our time."

Ellison later wrote of his experiences with the Federal Writers Project in his 1964 essay collection, Shadow and Act. About this collection, George P. Elliott wrote, "the first two-thirds of this book, for the most part quite personal to the writer, says more about being an American Negro, and says it better, than any other book I know of."

Ellison's second and eagerly anticipated novel was destroyed in a fire in 1967. He would never complete that novel. He did continue to write essays and short stories for publication and lectured often at various universities. From 1970 to 1979, Ellison was honored by an appointment as New York University's Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities. In 1985 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. An additional essay collection, Going to the Territory, appeared in 1986.

At his death in 1994, Ellison was one of the most celebrated American authors. The following year, the executor of Ellison's literary estate, John F. Callahan, discovered some unpublished stories. In 1996, The New Yorker magazine published "Boy on a Train," and "I Did Not Learn Their Names." A final collection, Flying Home and Other Stories appeared in 1997. It contained stories written between 1937 and 1954, including several never-before-published works.

Irving Howe published a review of Invisible Man in The Nation on May 5, 1952. He included the following remarks, which, among others, well express Ellison's legacy:

Some reviewers, from the best of intentions, have assured their readers that this is a good novel and not merely a good Negro novel. But of course Invisible Man is a Negro novel -- what white man could ever have written it? It is drenched in Negro life, talk, music: it tells us how distant even the best of the whites are from the black men that pass them on the streets; and it is written from a particular compound of emotions that no white man could possibly simulate. To deny that this is a Negro novel is to deprive the Negroes of their one basic right: the right to cry out their difference.

Ralph Ellison spent his life pursuing, tagging, and offering up for public display and evaluation just such differences.

This essay was submitted by Virginia Brackett, Ph. D., a professor at Triton College.