This page gives you a short, informative biography as well as useful links to other Ellison sites.

Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/ellison-main.html

Crucial for students doing research on The Invisible Man, this extremely useful site gives you the e-text of Ellison's famous novel, which you can access chapter by chapter, as well as fascinating scholarly essays on Ellison's work and on studies of race and popular culture relevant to Ellison. Also interesting are contemporary reviews of The Invisible Man, which provide insights on how the novel was initially received.

BIOGRAPHY
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) was born in Oklahoma. Ellison's father died in 1917, and his mother took on domestic work to support the family. In 1933 Ellison received a scholarship to study music and music theory at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he began reading modern fiction and poetry and writing his own poetry.

He traveled to New York in 1936, during the Great Depression, to work for the summer as a musician in order to pay for his last year of school. In New York, he became friends with the writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. With Wright's encouragement, Ellison began writing reviews and short stories. Wright also helped him get a job working on the New Deal's Federal Writer's Project, which enabled him to research and write about the lives of African Americans.

He began writing his only published novel, The Invisible Man, in 1945; it was published in 1952 and won numerous awards, including the National Book Award. Ellison also published several short stories and two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). Though his written work is not extensive, Ellison is considered one of the most important writers and thinkers of the twentieth century on the subject of race relations.