Ralph Ellison Book summary

Ralph Ellison was born to the children of slaves in 1914 in Oklahoma. The author's father was a construction worker and he passed away when the author was only three years old, which left him to be raised by his mother, who worked as a maid. Ellison had an interest in Jazz from a young age, and he went to college, at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama hoping to become a composer. The Tuskegee Institute served as the model for the State College for blacks which is featured in the novel. The Tuskegee Institute was founded by Booker T. Washington, a black educator who advocated for a focus on economic development as a means for creating a racially harmonious America. Ellison's first novel features a similar founder with a similar ideology that the protagonist then attempts to come to terms with.

Ellison moved to New York where he came into contact with several prominent black writers like Richard Wright as he became involved with the Federal Writer's Project. He then joined the Merchant Mariners and participated in the second world war with that body of force. After the war, Ellisson secured the Rosenwald Fellowship under which he wrote Invisible Man. The novel's success allowed him to complete several lecture circuits around America and Europe while he attempted to write his second novel. Ellison never published his second novel but he left behind several manuscripts that were published as books after his death in 1994.