Ralph Ellison’s Life

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

and his family lived among middle class whites. Ellison was endowed with learning and intellectual curiosity. Ellison was introduced to a new world, one that he would make his own. His history, folktales, and music were already important to him. He often wrote about his Afro-American heritage:
“There is no point in complaining over the past or apologizing for one’s fate. But for blacks, there are no hiding places down here, neither in country or city. They are an American people who are geared to what is and who yet are driven by a sense of what is possible for human life to be in this society. The nation could not survive being deprived of their presence because, by the irony implicit in the dynamics of American democracy, they symbolize both its most stringent testing and the possibility of its greatest human freedom.” (Quoted in Crouch 90)
Ellison felt as if he had to link the two different worlds together. Through music, he felt like he could do so:
He was from the ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

(Quoted in Clegg 527)
This poem stimulated Ellison most profoundly. In 1937, through Langston Hughes, Ellison met Richard Wright, who was then seeking a publisher for his first book, the short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children. Wright was also co-editor of a magazine called New Challenge, to which he invited Ellison to contribute a book review and a short story. In that same year Ellison’s mother died. He had to go home to Dayton to help his brother. After the two boys lost their home, a local black lawyer allowed them to stay in his office. The office space and the typewriter that was there allowed Ellison to write some of his earliest short stories.
From 1938 to ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: