Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. Though his talents and interests were varied, he decided in high school to pursue a career as a musician. In 1936, three years into a music degree at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, he left for Harlem with his trumpet, hoping it might bring him enough money to return for a final year of study. However, after spending several lean months there, Ellison revised his plans. Too poor to return to Tuskegee, he took inspiration from his new friends, writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and decided to develop his literary skills. Between 1945 and 1952, while he was writing Invisible Man, Ellison published articles in well-known journals such as Antioch Review, New Republic, and Saturday Review. His ambitious novel undertakes nothing less than a panoramic examination of the psychological, cultural, and political lives that African Americans led in the first half of the century.
Heading north. The 6.5 million black Americans who moved from the rural South to the urban North between 1910 and 1970 collectively brought about one of the greatest transformations to American society of the twentieth century.
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