When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. “You are hereby warned,” Ralph Ellison wrote to his friend Albert Murray in 1951, “that I have ...

"An autobiography through the previously unpublished letters of the renowned author of Invisible Man, with insights into the riddle of American identity, the writer's craft, and his own life and work.

Arguably unique in American literature, Ralph Ellison became nearly as well known for what he didn’t publish as for what he did. His towering achievement, “Invisible Man” (1952), which won the ...

My introduction to Ralph Ellison’s work was exactly how he describes being introduced to his literary heroes. Ellison stated that your “imagination takes off like a jazz musician on a flight of ...

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, Random House, 1,060 pages, $50 I first met the American novelist Ralph Ellison in the summer of 1963, when he gave ...

Before he became a writer, Ralph Ellison was an emerging photographer. Rarely-seen documentary images, gathered in a forthcoming book, reveal his lifelong engagement with the camera. By Arthur Lubow ...

From early drafts to posthumous releases, Ralph Ellison’s fiction and nonfiction reveal different layers of his genius. Some ...

There is a literature dedicated to fire—think of Dante, or Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”—and there is a literature consumed by fire quite literally. A ...

A new children’s biography about famed Oklahoman and "Invisible Man" author Ralph Ellison is now on bookshelves.

NEW YORK — When I began reading serious fiction in the benighted 1950s there were only a few black writers that I was conscious of and read religiously. I pored over the eloquent and moving essays and ...

Ralph Ellison in Italy, 1957. Courtesy of James Whitmore/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images In April 1956, Ralph Ellison wrote to his friend and fellow writer, Albert Murray, from Rome where he ...