A Brief Biography of Ralph Waldon Ellison

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Today we are going to talk and expression the feelings and hardship of a man called by the name of Ralph Waldo Ellison. Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City. His parents were Ida (Brownie) and Lewis Ellison. Ralph was named after the famous New England poet, "Ralph Waldo Emerson." His father (Lewis Ellison) was killed in an car accident when Ralph was only three years old. They was like most kids Ralph's mother had high expectations for her two boys. When he was five his mother (Ida) bought him a small desk and chair with a typewriter for Christmas.
They was evicted out of their home, so they moved into a rent-free housing that had shelves full of books that had been left. One book they left that Ralph read was James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans ten times by the time he was eight. Also at the age of eight Ellison took interest in building and working on radios. He made a white friend named Hoolie that was interest in the same hobby. Later on his friend moved to apply for his ham radio licenses. After his friend moved he contribute his life to music. He learned on his own and was taught how to play the cornet by his neighbor, Mr. Mead. He went to try out and was accepted in the school band at the age of eight.
Ellison spent four years at all-black Douglass High School from 1929 to 1933. In order to help with household expenses he held a number of odd jobs, which included mowing lawns, hawking newspapers, working as an elevator operator, shining shoes, and jerking sodas at the Randolph's Drug Store. Through his childhood during the cotton-picking season Ellison's classmates would go work in the field with their parents and came back home with new black jokes and stories, which Ellison had...

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...exotic. A 1965 "Book World Poll" identifying Invisible Man as the most distinguished postwar American novel. During Ralph Ellison's writing career, he wrote the novel "Invisible Man." His novel was based on stories he had heard from his friends from Tuskegee who served in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Several of Ellison's short stories were published while he was in the military. Two of the more popular ones were "King of the Bingo Game" and "Flying Home." Thus he began making a name for himself as a short story writer. It had been Ellison's goal to portray the richness and fullness of black life in America and the importance of black folk tradition in defining the black person. He was determined to illustrate the blending of black and whites cultures in America, and realized that he personified the theory and was himself a product of all the great writers of the past.

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