1914

Birth of Ralph Waldo Ellison on March 1 in Oklahoma City seven years after the Territories are granted statehood. His father, Lewis Alfred Ellison, had come to Oklahoma from Chattanooga, Tennessee three years earlier as a construction foreman with his wife, Ida Millsap Ellison, who had grown up on a farm in White Oak, Georgia.

1917

Death of Ellison's father, who had become a small businessman selling ice and coal. His mother takes on work as a nursemaid, janitress, and domestic in order to support poverty-stricken family.

1918

Taken with his younger brother, Herbert, to Abbeville, South Carolina to visit grandfather Alfred Ellison, an illiterate ex-slave who had served as a local official during the Reconstruction.

1920

Attends Frederick Douglass Elementary School in Oklahoma City, and reads everything he can get his hands on at the Paul Lawrence Dunbar Library.

1929

Hears Lester Young playing with members of the Blue Devils Orchestra - predecessor of Count Basie's Band. Deeply impressed by black cultural heroes in jazz as well as in folk life.

1931

Graduates with honors from an all black school, where he had been first-chair trumpeter in the school band and its student conductor.

1933

Leaves Oklahoma City by freight train to study music and music theory as a scholarship student at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

1935

Becomes enamored with T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." "Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand them, its range of allusion was as mixed and varied as Louis Armstrong." Begins rigourously studying modern fiction and poetry as well as writing his own poetry.

1936

In the height of the Great Depression, he travels to New York to study sculpture and to find summer employment as a musician to pay for his last year at Tuskegee.  Because of meager earnings decides to remain in New York. Takes on many odd jobs during this period: server behind food bar at the Harlem YMCA, substitute receptionist and file clerk for psychoanalyst Henry Stack Sullivan, and factory worker. Also studies under the sculptor Richmond Barthé, but abandons it for writing after a year.

1937

Death of his mother in Dayton, Ohio. Spends winter there with his brother; they support themselves by hunting quail, which they sell to General Motors executives. In New York, Langston Hughes introduces him to Richard Wright.  With Wright's encouragement, composes his first book review and first short story - the former is published in New Challenge.

1938

Close friendship blossoms with Wright, who finds the young Ellison "terribly curious about art, the meaning of experience, and especially Negro experience."  Wright assists him in landing a job with the New Deal's Federal Writer's Project on which he works for nearly four years.  Position provides not only financial support, but also allows for a deeper understanding of his future social, historical, and literary role. Spends many months digging up material in the Schomburg Library for The Negro in New York" assignment and, as part of the "Living Lore Unit," studying the games and rhymes of Negro children and documenting other examples of urban and industrial lore.

1938-1941

Contributes essays and reviews to the New Masses  and other radical periodicals.  Joins the chorus of critics deprecating the New Negro Movement and calling instead for realism as the literary form appropriate for the radical writer.

1939-1944

Publishes eight short stories, and writing grows in eloquence and complexity from story to story. By 1940, no longer showing Wright "any of my writing, because by that time I understood that our sensibilities were quite different; and, what I was hoping to achieve in fiction was something quite different from what he wanted to achieve."

1940

Writes a critical review of Langston Hughes' The Big Sea in New Masses under the title "Stormy Weather."

1941

Praises Wright's Native Son highly in a review calling it "The first philosophical novel by an American Negro in the front rank of American fiction."

1942

Tries unsuccessfully to enlist the Navy Band: becomes managing editor of The Negro Quarterly.

1943

Covers Harlem race riot for New York Post.  "It was during the war and there was a lot of tension and after some altercation between a policeman and a Negro soldier and his mother and wife in a bar, Harlem just exploded and they rioted for a day and a night and destroyed many of the white businesses...Most of the business area in Harlem, the neighborhood grocers and so on, was shattered, looted, burned."  Joins the Merchant Marine because he wants "to contribute to the war, but [not] be in a Jim Crow army"; serves for two years as a sea cook.

1944

Rosenwald Foundation awards him a scholarship to write a novel.  Affected by the experience of friends in the Army Air Corps, he plans a novel set in Nazi Germany in a prisoner-of-war camp, in which the ranking officer is a Negro pilot who has beneath him in rank a number of white pilots.  "King of the Bingo Game" is published in the journal November .  In this short story, he claims to have discovered his own fictional voice: "It had the realism that goes beyond and becomes surrealism."

1945

During summer, he begins writing Invisible Man while on sick leave from service in the Merchant Marine.  "When I was struggling with a quite different narrative, it announced itself in what were to become the opening words of its prologue" ("I am an invisible man").

1946

Marries Fanny McDonnell, his second wife, who helps support them during the seven years he works on Invisible Man.  Other sources of income include occasional writing, free-lance photography, building audio amplifiers, and installing high-fidelity sound systems.

1953

Invisible Man wins the National Book Award, the National Newspaper Publisher's Russwurm Award, and the Chicago Defender's Award for "symbolizing the best in American Democracy."

1955-1957

Lives in Rome as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; begins work on a second novel.

1958-1961

Instructor in Russian and American literature at Bard College.

1960

London-based literary magazine Noble Savage publishes "And Hickman Arrives," one of the stories in his never to be completed second novel.  Eight excerpts from the work-in-progress published in periodicals between 1960 and 1977.

1962-1964

Takes a creative writing position at Rutgers University.

1963

Enigmatic second novel said to be almost ready for publicaton, a prediction intermittently repeated in following years.

1964

Random House publishes Shadow and Act , a collection of essays, reviews, and interviews written over a twenty-two-year period and concerned with literature and folklore, Negro musical expression (especially jazz and the blues), and the relationship between the Negro-American subculture and North American culture as a whole.  "Their basic significance...is auto- biographical...These essays represent...some of the necessary effort which a writer of my background must make in order to possess the meaning of his experience."  Becomes a Fellow in American Studies at Yale.

1965

In a Book Week poll, two hundred authors, editors, and critics select Invisible Man as the most distinguished novel published by an American during the previous twenty years. Refuses to attend a Negro writers conference held at the New School for Social Research, at which he is condemned by one participant for "standing outside of his people's struggle, making Olympian remarks about how that struggle should be conducted."

1967

Substantial portion of the manuscript of his second novel destroyed in fire that razes summer home in the Berkshires. 

1969

Well received during a March visit to West Point to speak to the plebe class; badly received by black students during April visit to Oberlin College to speak about the blending of American black culture and American white culture.  Awarded the Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, by President Lyndon Johnson.

1970

Awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et Lettres by Andre Malraux, the French minister of cultural affairs.

1970-1980

Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University.

1975

Speaks at the opening of the Ralph Ellison Public Library in Okalahoma City.

1978

In a Wilson Quarterly poll of professors of American literature, Invisible Man is identified as the most important novel published in the United States since World War II.

1981

Tells interview that "if I'm going to be remembered as a novelist, I'd better produce a few more books."

1982

Random House publishes special thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, with an insightful introduction by the author.

1986

Random House publishes Going to the Territory, a second collection of essays, addresses, and reviews.

1994

Ralph Ellison dies on April 16 at the age of 80 in Harlem.

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