Ralph Ellison Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Ralph Waldo Ellison is a literary fiction author from Oklahoma City in the United States.

The author was born in 1914 to construction foreman Alfred Ellison who died while he was just three. His mother was church stewardess Ida Milsap that brought him all the books he wanted to read from the many houses she was contracted to clean.

Ellison went to Oklahoma City’s Frederick Douglass School, where he studied symphonic composition. Aged eight, he began playing the trumpet and went to the Montgomery, Alabama based Tuskegee Institute when he was eighteen to study music.

It was during this time that he worked several odd jobs including freelance photographer, janitor, jazz musician, and shoeshine boy. He would also become a game hunter which he has asserted is a skill he got from reading a lot of Ernest Hemingway.

He only spent three years studying music before he dropped out of college. But he would surprisingly win several honorary doctorates from the likes of Harvard University, Tuskegee Institute, the University of Michigan and Rutgers University.

Ellison credits “The Waste Land” by TS Elliot as being responsible for arousing his interest in literary fiction. It was after reading this poem that she started reading literary criticism as he searched for the kind of sensibility he found in Eliot. He could not find it in any of the poetry he read until he stumbled upon Richard Wright.

When in 1936 he moved to New York, he was fortunate enough to meet Langstone Hughes and Richard Wright, who encouraged him to pursue his passion for fiction. He would go on to become a renowned literary critic, short story author and novelist.

Ralph Waldo Ellison would also become a professor at several universities including the likes of the US Military Academy, the Library of Congress and Yale University. He would become an Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities in 1970 and spent a decade at the post.

He was also honored with the chevalier de L’Ordre des Artes et Lettres, which is the most prestigious award one can get as a writer in France. He was named New York University’s professor emeritus in 1982, even as he continued writing and teaching for several years after that.
Ellison died of cancer twelve years later at his New York City home.

Ralph Waldo Ellison started penning a manuscript about an American pilot that had been imprisoned in a prisoner of war camp in Germany during the 1940s. He got the inspiration for the beginning of “Invisible Man” while he was visiting friends.

According to Ellison, the 1952 published novel is all about human error and incense and the struggle through illusion to reality. The author said it was all about portraying the artists as a rabble rouser and features a series of reversals.

Ellison would make his name for his debut Invisible man, which would be the winner of the National Book Award and the Russwurm Award. He would then become one of the twentieth century’s most important authors in the United States.

In addition to his literary fiction novels, he has also published several short stories and non fiction works. Ellison has also written two non fiction works that are the 1986 published “Going to the Territory” and the 1964 published “Shadow and Act.”

These two combined with numerous writing and unpublished speeches would become part of “The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison,” published posthumously in 1995.

“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison was hailed as a classic masterpiece when it was first published in 1952. It has been one of those rare pieces that have become icons in the American literary landscape.

Ellison not only chronicles his nightmarish journey across the divides of race, but also explores truths on the workings of bigotry and how these have a huge impact on both perpetrators and victims.

As he travels from the Deep South to the basements and streets of Harlem, from a communist rally where black are made out to be trophies to a terrifying battle where they are made into caged animals, the lead takes readers into a very different world.

It is a world where the real world is thrown into hilarious but nonetheless harsh relief. The sardonic and suspenseful novel is told in diverse language that captures the white, and black nature of the United States to make for one of the most dazzling and audacious novels of the twentieth century.

Ralph Ellison’s novel “Juneteenth” follows on from the classic “Invisible Man” in chronicling the story of a prodigal from the twentieth century. Moving, wise and brilliantly crafted, it has been hailed as the work of tone of the finest literary fiction authors America has ever produced.
Senator Adam Sunraider is dying when he demands that he be told what had happened. He makes his demands of the itinerant preacher who had taken him in as an orphan many years ago.
Daddy Hickman the preacher had raised Sunraider to become a preacher just like him but he decided to become a politician in his adult years. The story explores the joys of being a boy in the south, lovemaking in the Oklahoma sun and bucolic days making films.

Behind everything is the mystery of how the orphan boy left everything behind to go find something that seems to have eluded him all the same. It is a story that shows Ellison at the height of his powers as he writes a story of staggering virtuosity that evokes ordinary speech and rhythms of gospel and jazz.

“Shadow and Act” by Ralph Ellison is a genius collection of essays that provides an inside look into the ideas and mind of the man best known for “Invisible Man.”

Making use of the same stylish and supple prose and intellectual incisiveness, Ellison explores his antecedents. He shines a light on the culture, music and literature of both white and black America.

He writes in a virtuostic range that encomapsses the wrks of Charlie Parker, Mark Twain, Mahalia Jackson, and Richard Wright. He also incorporates the Dante like nature of Harlem as he writes in a setting that traces his evolution and author as a writer including his very first work “Invisible Man.”

Every page of the collection shows the author’s contrarian and often idiosyncratic brilliance as he refutes the whiteand balack stereotypes of what an African American author should be or write.

The result is a work that continues to delight, instructs and sometimes outrages its readers.