Invisible Man Ralph Ellison Research Paper

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Ralph Waldo Ellison was one of the most brilliant, influential writers of the 19th century who was inspired by his own life. He was born on March 1, 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and named after journalist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (A&E Television Networks n.d.). Ralph and his younger brother were raised by their mother because their father died when he was only three years old. She worked as a nursemaid, a janitor and a housemaid to make ends meet for her family (Library of Congress 1). During World War II, Ellison served as a Merchant Marine, and afterward he worked a variety of jobs, such as free-lance photography and the installation of audio systems (Johnson 5). Although he loved jazz music, Ellison’s original career goal was to be a classical music composer and performer. When Ellison was a child, he was always drawn to music, playing trumpet at an early age, and then studying classical composition at the Tuskegee Institute under the instruction of William Dawson (Charles Johnson 5). Ellison went to New York City to earn expenses for his senior year at Tuskegee and while in New York, a meeting with writer Richard Wright …show more content…
Invisible Man was published in 1952 and its plot is an African-American civil rights worker from the South who moves to New York and feels so alone and out of place due to the racism that he encounters. (A&E Network 1). This novel was on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks and won the National Book Award. Still today, Invisible Man’s popularity and reputation is strong. Some read Ellison’s literature with a sense of jealousy, because everything one could want in a novel is in his work: humor, suspense, and black history (that is, American history) (Johnson 7). Anthropology, modernism, and jazz all interact with each other in framing and mapping Ellison’s writing (Bloom
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