Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we are exploring
the life and work of a true titan of American
literature, a man the New York Times once said
was among the gods of America's literary Parnassus.
We are talking about Ralph Waldo Ellison, and
we're going to be tracing the path that led him
to write just one novel in his lifetime, but
a novel that completely changed the landscape,
Invisible Man. And right there, that's the central
paradox, isn't it? He's named after Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the great philosopher of American individualism,
of self -reliance, a man who was all about being
seen. The most visible intellectual, really.
And yet Ellison's entire career, his masterpiece,
is about the exact opposite. It's about the experience
of being unseen. So if Emerson's whole thing
was, you know, forge your own path, be an individual.
Ellison comes along and asks, OK, but what happens
when the world you're in refuses to even acknowledge
that you exist, that the identity you forged
is simply ignored? And that's the tension. That's
the engine of the whole thing. The promise of
America, that Emersonian ideal crashing right
into the reality of American prejudice. That's
what fueled Invisible Man. So that's our mission
for this deep dive. We've got the biographies,
the critical essays, and we want to figure out
how did a young man from Oklahoma who really
started out as a musician. And a very serious
one. How did he become the author of a book that
a 1965 poll would later call the most important
novel since World War II? It's a huge journey.
It's a massive journey. But before we even start,
we have to talk about a little biographical quote
that, you know, just sets the stage perfectly.
Okay. So the official record states he was born
in Oklahoma City on March 1st, 1913. He died
in 1994 at 81. Right. But I saw in the sources
there's a discrepancy there. He didn't always
say 1913, did he? No, he didn't. For most of
his public life, he would give his birth year
as 1914. Well, who knows for sure, but the evidence
for 1913 is solid. The census records, for example.
But what's really fascinating is that biographers
found a note from his mother where the year 1913
seems to have been erased and 1914 written over
it. Wow. So the author of a book about creating
your own narrative was, in a small way, creating
his own narrative from day one. He was editing
his own life story. It's a subtle act of self
-invention, and it tells you everything about
the kind of mind we're dealing with. Someone...
who is deeply aware of how identity is constructed.
Okay, let's unpack that journey. Part one, from
Oklahoma to Alabama. This is the musician's path,
but also his intellectual awakening. It starts
in Oklahoma from 1913 to 1933. And you really
have to start with his father, Louis Alfred Ellison.
He seems like the source of that initial literary
ambition. Absolutely. Lewis was a small business
owner, a construction foreman, but he loved literature.
He was the one who named his son after Emerson.
And Ralph later found out his father had dreamed
that he would grow up to be a poet. But his father's
influence was cut short, tragically. Very short.
He died in 1916 after a work accident. Ralph
was only three years old. And that left the family
in a really precarious situation. Completely.
He, his mother, Ida Millsap, she remarried three
times. There was no real stability. And that
meant for Ralph, childhood wasn't about leisure.
It was about work. He had to contribute. And
the sources list the jobs he took on as a kid.
It's quite a list. It is. He was a busboy, a
shoeshine boy, a hotel waiter, even a dentist
assistant. And you have to think about what that
teaches you. The social dynamics. Exactly. You're
serving, you're watching, you're often being
overlooked, you're learning about class and race
from the ground up. It's an education you can't
get in a classroom. And running parallel to this
life of hard labor was his first real passion.
Music. Music. Music was his everything. It was
his escape, his discipline. He got free lessons
on trumpet and alto sax, and he got so good he
became the school bandmaster at Douglas High
School. He even worked for a full year after
graduating just to buy his own trumpet. That's
dedication. Total dedication. That was his path.
That was his identity. Literature was his father's
dream, but music was his reality. And it's that
trumpet that literally gets him out of Oklahoma.
It does. Which brings us to Tuskegee Institute
from 1933 to 1936. This was the prestigious all
-black university founded by Booker T. Washington.
Ellison applies twice, and he finally gets in.
But not for his grades, right? Not for his grades.
He got in because the school orchestra desperately
needed a trumpet player. And the story of how
he got there is just amazing. He didn't have
money for a ticket. No. He hopped freight trains,
hoboed his way from Oklahoma to Alabama to get
an education. That image just says everything
about his drive. So he arrives at Tuskegee, this
icon of black education and uplift. And what
does he find? He finds an environment that is,
in its own way, just as rigidly structured as
the white society he came from. The critic Hilton
Owls makes a really key point about this. What's
that? Al's notes that Ellison found Tuskegee
to be incredibly class conscious. It wasn't just
about being black. It was about what kind of
black person you were. Were you from the right
family? Did you have the right connections? So
he was an outsider all over again. Deplete outsider.
And Al's argues that this was crucial for his
development as a writer. It sharpened his satirical
lens. Because he wasn't invested in playing the
game. He couldn't play it, so he just watched
it. And he looked back at what Owls calls the
sniveling ethos of the place with, you know,
both scorn and despair. That critical distance,
that feeling of being an observer even among
his own people. That's the voice of Invisible
Man. So he's there officially to study music
under some pretty serious instructors. Oh, yeah.
William L. Dawson, the composer, was head of
the department. He studied with Hazel Harrison,
a renowned piano instructor. His musical education
was top tier. But he was leading this secret
second life in the library. A dual education,
exactly. Music was his major, but literature
became his obsession. And he said that reading
T .S. Eliot's The Wasteland for the first time
was just a massive transformative moment. I can
imagine. The fragmentation, the different voices
in that poem. It must have felt like a blueprint
for describing the modern world he was experiencing.
A key to unlocking it. Yeah. And then in 1934,
he gets a job as a desk clerk in the library,
which is like giving him the keys to the kingdom.
So he's just devouring everything. Everything.
James Joyce, Gertrude Stein. He's mentored by
the librarian, Walter Bowie Williams. But the
real guide. The person who turned this passion
into a possible vocation was his English teacher,
Morteza Drexel Sprague. He dedicated his first
essay collection, Shadow and Act, to Sprague,
didn't he? He did, because Sprague was the one
who showed him, as Ellison put it, the possibilities
of literature as a living art. What did that
mean, a living art? It meant connecting the books
to his own life. Sprague introduced him to Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude
the Obscure. And Ellison said he identified immediately
with their brilliant, tortured antiheroes. It
seems like a strange connection. A young black
man in 1930s Alabama identifying with a 19th
century Russian intellectual murderer. But think
about it. The narrator of Invisible Man is not
a simple hero. He's hyper intellectual. He's
paranoid. He's isolated. He's constantly in his
own head. That is a Dostoevsky character. Ellis
wasn't looking for simple protest figures. He
was looking for psychological complexity. He
was looking for a way to write from the inside
out. Exactly. Not just shouting from the outside.
And this connects to another one of his passions,
something that seems totally separate at first.
Technology. The audio equipment. Yeah. As a kid,
he would take radios apart and rebuild them.
Just fascinated with how they worked. As an adult,
he built these incredibly elaborate, high -fidelity
stereo systems. He even wrote about it for High
Fidelity magazine in 1955. So he's a tinkerer,
an engineer. He's an engineer of sound. And the
scholar John S. Wright argues that this technical
skill, this understanding of how to layer sounds,
how to isolate frequencies, how to mix different
inputs, directly informed how he constructed
his novel. So you're saying Invisible Man is
structured like a piece of music being mixed
on a soundboard? In a way, yes. Think about the
shifts in voice. You have the high -minded philosophical
prose of the prologue. Then you have southern
folk vernacular. Then the rigid ideological language
of the brotherhood. Then this beautiful jazz
-like stream of consciousness. He's layering
all these different American voices. He's layering
the blues tradition, the folk tradition, right
alongside the European high modernism of Eliot
Joyce that he found in the library. It's a complex
composition. And then in 1936, he decides the
composition needs a new venue. He leaves Tuskegee
without a degree and heads for New York. Which
brings us to part two. Harlem, the writers, and
a profound political disillusionment. He arrives
on July 5, 1936. The original plan was to study
sculpture, but he lands in Harlem at the YMCA
on 135th Street, and he's immediately plugged
into the center of black American culture. And
he gets a huge introduction right away. A game
-changing introduction. He meets Langston Hughes.
Harlem's unofficial diplomat. That's the perfect
description. Hughes opens the door for him, introduces
him to the entire black literary world, which
at that time was heavily influenced by Communist
Party sympathies. And that's how he meets the
other major figure in his life at this point,
Richard Wright. Yes. A very, very important and
very complicated relationship. Wright saw Ellison's
talent immediately. Ellison sent him a book review
and Wright wrote back and said, you need to be
writing fiction. And he did. He did. His first
published story, Jaime's Bull, comes directly
from that experience hobbling on the train to
Tuskegee. Within a couple of years, he's publishing
reviews, articles, short stories, over 20 pieces
between 37 and 44. He's a professional writer.
But he's still thinking visually, too. He didn't
just leave that sculpture idea behind. No. His
fascination with perception, with how we see
things, was always there. And this comes through
in his collaboration with the great photographer
Gordon Parks in 1948. This was the Harlem is
Nowhere photo essay. Right. It was about the
Lafargue Clinic, which was the first racially
integrated psychiatric clinic in Harlem, a really
groundbreaking place. And Ellison wasn't just
writing captions for the photos. Not at all.
He wrote an essay called The Pictorial Problem,
which is basically the theoretical manifesto
for the project. He was thinking deeply about
the psychological impact of images, about how
photography could either reinforce stereotypes
or break them. He was providing the intellectual
framework for Parks' camera. It just shows how
he was constantly working on this problem of
visibility from every angle, sound, text, image.
Every single angle. And that brings us to the
political angle, which becomes so crucial. As
we said, he was in Richard Wright's circle. publishing
in left -wing magazines. Wright was very openly
a member of the Communist Party. Ellison's affiliation
was quieter, but it was there. It was definitely
there. But then World War II happens and everything
changes. The moment of disillusionment. It's
a profound break. Both he and Wright completely
lose faith in the party. They felt that it had
fundamentally betrayed African -Americans. What
was the specific nature of that betrayal? Well,
the initial appeal of the party was its focus
on Marxist class politics. The idea was that
racial oppression was just a byproduct of capitalism
and a workers' revolution would solve it. But
during the war, the party line shifted. The priority
became supporting the allied war effort, promoting
national unity. So they replaced that revolutionary
class politics with a much softer, gradual social
reformism. So they were essentially telling black
members to put their most urgent struggles on
the back burner for the sake of the war. Exactly.
And for Ellison and Wright, this was the ultimate
betrayal. It was just one more institution that
promised a kind of liberation, but in the end
refused to truly see their reality. The blindness
was everywhere. And that anger, that sense of
being let down by the one ideology that promised
a way out, that's what he pours into the novel.
All of it. And we have this incredible quote
from a letter he wrote to Richard Wright on August
18, 1945. It's the moment the mission for Invisible
Man becomes crystal clear. What does he say?
He writes, Maybe we can't smash the atom. But
we can, with a few well -chosen, well -written
words, smash all that crummy filth to hell. Smash
all that crummy filth to hell. That's a declaration
of war. It's a declaration of literary war. He's
turning all of that political disappointment
into artistic energy. Invisible Man is born right
in the wake of that rupture. It's his answer
to the party's failure. And all this is happening
while his personal life is also in flux. He had
a first marriage that ended. Yes, to an actress
named Rose Poindexter. They married in 1938 and
divorced in 1945. The biographies suggest it
was a difficult relationship. And then in 1946,
he marries Fanny McConnell. And she seems to
be the person who really makes the novel possible.
Absolutely essential. Fanny was an incredible
person in her own right. A writer, a theater
founder, a brilliant intellectual. And she became
his rock. She supported them financially while
he wrote. She did. She took a job so he could
write full time for seven years. But it was more
than that. She was his first reader, his editor.
She typed his longhand manuscripts. She was an
active collaborator in the creation of this masterpiece.
So while he was preparing to smash all that crummy
filth, she was building the foundation that let
him do it. A true partnership. And it's incredible
to remember that even in the middle of all this.
In 1946, he's still composing music. The sources
say he wrote lyrics and music for at least two
songs. The musician was always there right alongside
the writer. And in 1952, those two voices, along
with the voice of the political disillusioned,
all come together. Which brings us to part three,
the achievement of invisibility. Yes. The book
is finally published. It's a novel told by an
unnamed African -American narrator charting his
journey from the South to Harlem and ultimately
underground. And the central concept, that idea
of invisibility, he defines it right up front.
He does. The narrator explains he's not a ghost
or a spirit. He's invisible in a figurative sense
because people refuse to see him. So it's a condition
imposed on him by society. It's a social and
moral failure of the world around him. And that
refusal to see him forces him into this state
of... deep dissociation, this search for an identity
that the world won't grant him. And he's exploring
all the different flavors of American racism,
the kind in the South versus the kind in the
North. They're very different. The Southern racism
is paternalistic. It's overt. The Northern racism
is more ideological, more organizational. But
the result is the same invisibility. And the
novel ends with him literally living underground.
In a forgotten basement room in New York City.
Right, and this is where that passion for technology
comes back in a huge way. The light bulbs. The
1 ,369 light bulbs that he has rigged up to illuminate
his hole, stealing power from the electric company.
And he's got his custom -built hi -fi stereo
system down there. So he's surrounded himself
with light, with technology, in order to be seen,
but he's in a place where no one can see him.
It's a perfect metaphor. He's trying to achieve
total clarity. to understand the chaos of the
world by listening to it on his stereo, by illuminating
it with all this light. But he has to withdraw
from that world completely to do it. He's taking
it all apart to see how it works, just like those
radios he built as a kid. And the narrator himself
was such a different kind of character for that
time. A radical departure. This was not the kind
of protagonist you saw in a lot of protest novels.
Yeah. He's educated. He's articulate. He's deeply
self -aware, almost dispassionate at times. His
anger is indelible. intellectual. It's filtered
through all that modernism he read at Tuskegee.
The book also didn't pull any punches on controversial
topics. Not at all. It deals with incest. And
most daringly for 1952, it gives an insider's
critique of the Communist Party, which she calls
the Brotherhood, in a novel. To do that at the
height of the McCarthy era was incredibly brave.
And the reception was just immediate. It was
explosive. In 1953, it wins the U .S. National
Book Award for fiction. And that was it. That
was his ticket. He was no longer an outsider.
He was now part of the literary establishment.
But true to form, he was still his own harshest
critic. Oh, absolutely. He was a perfectionist
to the core. And even when he's accepting this
huge honor, he says he felt he had only made
an attempt at a major novel and that he was still
unsatisfied with it. An attempt? That's mind
-boggling. For him, the artistic standard was
just impossibly high. But the world disagreed.
And the biggest confirmation of its importance
came later. The 1965 Book Week poll. Yes. 200
critics, authors, and editors were asked to name
the most important novel written since World
War II. And they chose Invisible Man. Over everything
else. Over Mailer, over Salinger, over Bellow.
What made it resonate so profoundly, especially
in the context of 1965 and the Civil Rights Movement?
I think it's because it offered complexity in
a time of slogans. It refused easy answers. It
argued that the black experience wasn't one single
thing. It was a multitude of things. It challenged
the simple narrative of progress by showing the
deep psychological cost of the struggle. It was
a novel about the failure of all ideologies.
And that spoke to a country that was grappling
with its own identity. So it became more than
just a great novel about the black experience.
It became a great American novel, period. A foundational
American novel. And Ellison used the visibility
that came with that fame. After his bad experience
with the Communist Party, he became a fierce
advocate for art as a moral instrument, as the
only thing that could truly cut through the blindness
of society. And that new role as a public intellectual
defines the next phase of his life, which takes
us to part four, scholar, teacher, and the immense
weight of the second novel. After the success,
he moves into the world of academia. He teaches
at Bard, at Rutgers, at Yale. He publishes his
first collection of essays, Shadow and Act. in
1964. And he dedicates it to Morteza Sprugg,
his old English teacher from Tuskegee. Bringing
it full circle. And by 1970, he has a permanent
prestigious post at NYU as the Albert Schweitzer
Professor of Humanities, where he stayed for
a decade. He was a major intellectual figure.
And he was being consulted in some really unexpected
places. I was fascinated by the detail about
the Hudson Institute. Isn't that incredible?
In 1962, Herman Kahn, the futurist, recruits
him as a consultant for a defense research think
tank. What on earth did a defense think tank
want with Ralph Ellison? They were trying to
think bigger. They realized that to understand
national security and strategy, you couldn't
just look at weapon systems. You had to understand
the national character, the culture, the history.
And they believed the author of Invisible Man
had unique insights into the soul of America.
That's a level of respect for a novelist that
you just don't see anymore. Almost never. At
the same time, he's traveling, he's lecturing
in Europe, he settles in Rome for a while and
becomes good friends with the writer Robert Penn
Warren. He was always in conversation with the
great minds of his time. And his writing continued
to focus on his two great loves. The black experience
and jazz music. His essays on jazz are just brilliant.
But the real window into his thinking during
these years comes from his correspondence with
the writer Albert Murray. Which was published
as Trading Twelves. Yes. And reading those letters,
it's like listening in on one of the great conversations
of the 20th century. They're debating the civil
rights movement. They're analyzing Duke Ellington.
They are arguing about the very language we should
use to describe the American experience. It's
an intellectual feast. But hanging over all of
this, the teaching, the essays, the awards, is
this giant question mark. The second novel. The
second novel and the terrible event that happened
in 1967. It's a true literary tragedy. He had
a summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, and
there was a massive house fire. And in that fire,
Ellison said, more than 300 pages of his manuscript
for the second novel were destroyed. I can't
even imagine for a perfectionist like him, someone
who was already unsatisfied with his masterpiece,
to lose that much work. It had to have been paralyzing,
devastating. It wasn't just the pages. It was
the momentum, the confidence. And yet he kept
working on it. For the rest of his life. For
nearly three more decades, he ended up writing
over 2 ,000 pages for this book. 2 ,000 pages.
But he never finished it. He never got it to
a place where he felt it was ready for the world.
He died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 with the
novel still incomplete. It was the great unfinished
project of his life. So for 42 years after Invisible
Man was published, he was wrestling with its
shadow. He was. And thankfully, we did eventually
get to see the results of that struggle. His
literary executor, John F. Callahan, began to
piece it all together. So he got some posthumous
collections? Yes. A book of short stories called
Flying Home came out in 1996. Then in 1999, Callahan
published Juneteenth, which was a 368 -page condensation
of that massive 2 ,000 -page manuscript. A sort
of edited, curated version of the unfinished
work. Exactly. But then, in 2010, the full thing
was published as three days before the shooting.
And that includes all the pages, all the drafts,
all the fragments. It lets you see the scale
of his ambition, but also the scale of his struggle.
Even with that struggle, his place in history
was secure. The awards he received are just staggering.
Oh, the recognition was immense. He got the Presidential
Medal of Freedom in 1969, the National Medal
of Arts in 1985. He was leader chevalier of the
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. He got
an honorary doctorate from Harvard. He was the
first African -American admitted to the Century
Association. It's an incredible list. And he's
been memorialized in the places that shaped him.
There's the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library in his
hometown of Oklahoma City. And a beautiful memorial
in Harlem, near where he lived for decades. Yes,
on 150th and Riverside Drive. It's a park dedicated
to him. And it has this huge 15 -foot bronze
slab with a cutout of a human figure, a literal
invisible man etched into the landscape of Harlem.
So to bring this all together, it feels like
his entire life was a funnel. All these early
experiences, the hard labor as a kid, the outsider
status at Tuskegee, the discovery of modernism,
the betrayal by the communists. And you have
to include the partnership with Fannie McConnell,
who... gave him the stability to even write the
book. All of those things, all those different
layers of sound, as we said, had to be there
to create the one singular voice of Invisible
Man. And the central tension of his life seems
to be right there in his most famous idea, the
tension between visibility and invisibility.
Absolutely. Here's a man who receives the highest
honors a country can bestow, presidential medals,
academic chairs, think tank consultancies. He
is an incredibly visible public figure. And his
entire life's work, the thing that made him famous,
is about the pain of being unseen. And his own
private life was dominated by this immense, invisible
struggle to finish that second. He was the most
famous chronicler of invisibility in the world.
His whole life embodied that paradox. A man of
so many talents, musician, technician, sculptor,
writer, who became famous for one single towering
achievement. Which leaves us with a final thought
for you, our listeners. Ellison wrestled his
whole life with the impossibility of having his
full, complex self seen by the public. He was
always more than just the author of Invisible
Man. So in our world today, a world that's just
saturated with information, where we are constantly
performing our identities on social media, does
that concept of invisibility still resonate?
The idea of being known for one thing but having
your true, complicated self overlooked. And maybe
to add to that, if Ellison's life shows us that
achieving real depth requires decades of labor,
of struggle, and even a kind of retreat from
the world. How does that challenge how we think
about our own lives today, when we're always
expected to be visible, to be projecting, to
be online? Is it possible that true self -knowledge,
the kind Ellison was searching for, can only
really happen when we allow parts of ourselves
to remain invisible? That's the question he leaves
us with. A perfect place to end. Thank you for
joining us for this deep dive into the life of
Ralph Ellison. My pleasure.