Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison (born March 1, 1914 in Oklahoma City , Oklahoma ; died April 16, 1994 in New York City , New York ) was an American author of African American descent.
Life
Ralph Ellison was born to a construction worker in Oklahoma City. His parents had moved from South Carolina shortly before he was born. Through his parents (his mother came from Georgia ), Ellison gained insight into the black experiences of the former slave states, but at the same time experienced in his childhood the comparatively liberal atmosphere in a so-called border state , which only became the 46th state to join the Union in 1907. This particular social and psychological starting point was characteristic of his particular literary peculiarity.
After finishing school in Oklahoma City, Ellison was able to study music in Tuskegee for three years with the help of a government scholarship . In 1936 he moved to Harlem to begin studying sculpture . TS Eliot's The Waste Land had already made a lasting impression on Ellison in Tuskegee . In Harlem, his political interests were awakened above all by Richard Wright and Langston Hughes . Wright also introduced Ellison to the great Russian writers, particularly Dostoevsky and Gorky. Ellison supported Wright in his political work, but in contrast to Wright did not get involved in party work. During his time in Harlem he made a living in a variety of ways, most notably as a jazz musician. At times he also worked for the YMCA and as a secretary for a psychiatrist. During the time of the Great Depression, he went to the countryside with his brother to fight hunger as a hunter.
These different stations in Ellison's life have all left their mark on the only novel he published during his lifetime: The Invisible Man appeared in 1952 (in the original The Invisible Man , translated into German by Georg Goyert ). In 1965 this novel by Ellison was voted the most important work in US literature of the preceding decades. Previously, Ellison had published various short stories in 1944 .
Posthumously was another work of fiction, Juneteenth , published, which was already in his lifetime Ellison's about to be published, however, important parts have been destroyed in a fire of the manuscript. In the following years the author tried in vain to reconstruct the lost pages from memory. 2010 a longer, 1,100 of the 2,000 pages of the manuscript comprehensive version came under the title Three Days Before the Shooting ... out. Ellison himself believed that a novelist could only write one really great novel in a lifetime. Ellison's essays were published in 1964 in the anthology Shadow and Act .
After receiving the National Book Awards in 1953 for The Invisible Man , Ellison received numerous honors and honorary posts. Among other things, he taught at the University of Chicago , at Yale and in a permanent position without special teaching obligations at New York University . In 1964 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1965 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
More than the majority of the other African American writers, Ellison was shaped by his immense reading, his profound knowledge of world literature as well as classical and modern music, ancient mythology and biblical and apocryphal traditions as well as his knowledge of nature and all kinds of living things. His knowledgeable devotion to classical as well as modern music was equally formative. In his literary work, Ellison Langston was closer to Hughes than, for example, Richard Wright or James Baldwin . Most of all, Hughes was familiar with jazz and blues, as well as black folklore, as well as his appreciation of black humor .
Works
-
Invisible Man . Random House, 1952 ISBN 0-679-60139-2
- The Invisible Man : Roman . Translation Georg Goyert . Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1954
-
Flying Home and Other Stories . Random House, 1996 ISBN 0-679-45704-6
- Flying home and other stories . Edited and introduction by John F. Callahan . Translation by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié. Zurich: Ammann, 1999
-
Juneteenth . Random House, 1999. ISBN 0-394-46457-5
- Juneteenth . Edited and epilogue by John F. Callahan. Translation by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié. Zurich: Ammann, 2000
- Three Days Before the Shooting… Modern Library, 2010. ISBN 978-0-375-75953-6
- Shadow and Act . Essays. Random House, 1964 ISBN 0-679-76000-8
- Going to the Territory . Essays. Random House, 1986. ISBN 0-394-54050-6
- The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison . Modern Library, 1995. ISBN 0-679-60176-7
- Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings . Modern Library, 2002. ISBN 0-375-76023-7
- Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray . Modern Library, 2000. ISBN 0-375-50367-6
literature
- Ross Posnock (Ed.): The Cambridge companion to Ralph Ellison. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2005, ISBN 978-0-521-82781-2 .
- Adam Bradley : Ralph Ellison in progress: from "Invisible man" to "Three days before the shooting ..." Yale Univ. Press, New Haven 2010, ISBN 978-0-300-17119-8 .
- Monika Plessner : Ralph Ellison. From: "Invisible Man" , in: Monika Plessner: I am the darker brother · The literature of black Americans · From the spirituals to James Baldwin. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-596-26454-5 , pp. 273-291.
Web links
- Literature by and about Ralph Ellison in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Monika Plessner: Ralph Ellison. From: "Invisible Man" , 1979, pp. 273-274.
- ↑ Thomas Leuchtenmüller: The moderate revolutionary , in: NZZ , March 1, 2014.
- ^ Members: Ralph Ellison. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 1, 2019 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ellison, Ralph |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Ellison, Ralph Waldo (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 1, 1914 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Oklahoma City |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 16, 1994 |
| Place of death | New York City |