Ralph Ellison Research Paper

Ralph Waldo Ellison is known to being born in Oklahoma City in 1913.It is said that Ralph Ellison’s career in literature is one of the unusual ones. When he was three, his dad, a coal and ice merchant, was murdered in a mischance, and his wife Ida and children Ralph and, Herbert were born into hard times of poverty. They were only able to live in rented scruffy apartments and wore used clothes while his mother did as best as possible to keep the house clean and work as a janitor.Ralph started earning money at a really young age by being a shoe-shiner, followed by as a bread-and-butter boy and later a waiter in a restaurant.(Cain 2)

In Oklahoma, the racial situation was a bit more moderate rather than in the far down parts of the South.Nevertheless,

Ellison had an “inveterate suspicion of sociology,” Rampersad reports. “To him, sociology typically reduces, compresses, and distorts knowledge. Intrinsically it lacked what it claimed to possess, a capacity for deep human understanding.” (429) (Cain 2) During those times white people had an inclination to simplify racial groups, this was something Ellison challenged in his writings. Ellison had an interview on 1961 which he criticized “the sociological approach” that white scholars had accepted and black Americans had unfortunately adopted.“Unfortunately,” he stated, “many Negroes have been trying to define their own predicament in exclusively sociological terms, a situation I consider quite shortsighted. (Cain

Then he joined the Communist Party that Wright and Hughes presented him to. Ellison and Wright would copy word by word, by hand the stories of Hemingway to get use to the deliberate rhythms he would have in his writing.

Life took a big term in 1937 when his mom started feeling ill. She had moved to Dayton,Ohio and died in October. Ellison and his brother started struggling because they wouldn't know when they were going to have their next meal. This marked a new phase of his life and decided to move to New York to continue his literary study and becoming a full-time writer.

During the last years of the war, Ellison served in the Marines and he refused to join the military where segregation was still going on. While traveling in Vermont, Ellison wrote down these words, “I am an invisible man”.With these few words, he decided to start a project which later became to be the famous book Invisible Man. In this novel, he talks about his lonely times in the war but does not clearly say that he might not know himself anymore. Ellison career didn't turn out as he imagined it to be like. Nevertheless, he was still proud of his work and refused to ever be