Plan ralph Ellison's Biography Summary of Invisible Man

Black community in Ralph Ellison’s novel "Invisible Man"
PLAN

1. 
   Ralph Ellison's Biography
   
2. 
   Summary of Invisible Man
   
3. 
   Invisible Man's Characters
   
4. 
   Invisible Man's Themes
   
5. 
   Analysis and Interpretation of Invisible Man
   
6. 
   Invisible Man - Key takeaways
   

What have Black authors said about representation, visibility, and police brutality before the 21st century? In Invisible Man (1952), Ralph Ellison discusses each of these components in a way that is up-to-date with current conversations about race in the USA. Ellison was interested in the ways that art could engage with social issues, but throughout his life, he remained committed to the writing of fiction as an art instead of a type of social critique.
Jefferson Pinder is a performance artist whose work deals with race and political struggle. In his 2005 piece, "Invisible Man," he embodies the narrator of Ellison's novel, in an underground bunker surrounded by lights, listening to jazz records.
Ralph Ellison's Biography
Much of Invisible Man coincides with events in Ellison's own life. Both he and the novel's narrator are Black men from the American South who attended prestigious all-Black universities, moved to New York City, got involved with labor advocacy groups, and experienced crises of faith in the institutions that they had once believed in. Ellison proclaimed in many places that Invisible Man is not an autobiographical work, though much of it was taken from events in his own life and caricatures real historical figures (Ellison, "The Art of Fiction").

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With the success of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison had worked his way into the American literary establishment. Wikimedia.
Ellison was born in Oklahoma in 1913 and named Ralph Waldo Ellison after the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. A literary life appeared to be in the stars for Ellison, especially since his father, a small business owner who died in 1916 after a work-related accident, originally hoped to be a poet.
As a student, Ellison aspired to be a musician, playing various instruments, and “eventually became his school bandmaster.”² His skills with the trumpet garnered him a scholarship to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama––an all-back university founded by Booker T. Washington––where he would play trumpet in the university's orchestra.
While attending Tuskegee, Ellison became interested in literature, and in 1935 he discovered T. S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land. Ellison worked in the university library and became interested in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, studying their narrative strategies and their sentence structures.
Ellison soon met fellow African American novelist Richard Wright, who was an editor at the New Challenge magazine. Wright encouraged Ellison to write book reviews and short stories for the magazine, which became the beginning of Ellison's literary career. When World War II broke out, Ellison enlisted as a cook in the Merchant Marine corps and served in the War. After returning home, he attained a grant to write a novel.
It took Ellison most of a decade to write Invisible Man, but after its publication in 1952, it received a wide readership, earned a National Book Award, and got Ellison entry into the US literary sphere. His writing proved sparse throughout the rest of his life, though he did publish a book of essays titled Shadow and Act in 1964. The rest of his life was spent teaching at various universities. His final novel––an unfinished draft of over 2,000 pages––was edited and published in 2010 with the title Three Days Before the Shooting.... A shorter version was released a decade earlier, titled Juneteenth (1999).