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اعظم 100 كتاب في التاريخ: ما سر هذه العظمة؟- دراسة بحثية
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Sep 2009
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Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914
[1]
– April 16, 1994) was an American
novelist
,
literary critic
,
scholar
and
writer
. He was born in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
. Ellison is best known for his novel
Invisible Man
, which won the
National Book Award
in
1953
.
[2]
He also wrote
Shadow and Act
(
1964
), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and
Going to the Territory
(
1986
).
Early life
Ralph Ellison, named after
Ralph Waldo Emerson
,
[3]
was born in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. Research by Lawrence Jackson, one of Ellison's biographers, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought. He had one brother named Herbert Millsap Ellison, who was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died when Ralph was three years old from stomach ulcers he received from an ice-delivering accident.
[3]
Many years later, Ellison would find out that his father hoped he would grow up to be a poet.
In 1933, Ellison entered the
Tuskegee Institute
on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor
William L. Dawson
. Ellison also had the good fortune to come under the close tutelage of the piano instructor
Hazel Harrison
. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent increasing amounts of time in the library, reading up on modernist classics. He specifically cited reading
T. S. Eliot
's
The Waste Land
as a major awakening moment for him.
Writing career
After his third year, Ellison moved to
New York City
to study the visual arts. He studied sculpture and photography. He made acquaintance with the artist
Romare Bearden
. Perhaps Ellison's most important contact would be with the author
Richard Wright
, with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship. After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged Ellison to pursue a career in writing, specifically fiction. The first published story written by Ellison was a short story entitled "Hymie's Bull," a story inspired by Ellison's hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944 Ellison had over twenty book reviews as well as short stories and articles published in magazines such as
New Challenge
and
New Masses
.
Wright was then openly associated with the
Communist Party
and Ellison was publishing and editing for communist publications, although his "affiliation was quieter," according to historian Carol Polsgrove in
Divided Minds.
[4]
Both Wright and Ellison lost their faith in the Communist Party during
World War II
when they felt the party had betrayed African Americans and replaced Marxist class politics with social reformism. In a letter to Wright, August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. ... 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." In the wake of this disillusion, Ellison began writing
Invisible Man,
a novel that was, in part, his response to the party's betrayal.
[5]
World War II was nearing its end when Ellison, reluctant to serve in the segregated army, chose merchant marine service over the draft.
[6]
In 1946 he married his second wife, Fanny McConnell. She worked as a photographer to help sustain Ellison. From 1947 to 1951 he earned some money writing book reviews, but spent most of his time working on
Invisible Man
.
Fanny also helped type Ellison's longhand text and assisted her husband in editing the typescript as it progressed.
Published in 1952,
Invisible Man
explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and
James Baldwin
, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel, with its treatment of taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism, won the 1953 U.S.
National Book Award for Fiction
.
[2]
The award was his ticket into the American literary establishment. Disillusioned by his experience with the Communist Party, he used his new fame to speak out for literature as a moral instrument.
[7]
In 1955, Ellison went abroad to Europe to travel and lecture before settling for a time in Rome, Italy, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a Bantam anthology called
A New Southern Harvest
in 1957.
Robert Penn Warren
was in Rome during the same period and the two writers became close friends.
[8]
In 1958, Ellison returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature at
Bard College
and to begin a second novel,
Juneteenth
.
During the 1950s he corresponded with his lifelong friend, the writer
Albert Murray
. In their letters they commented on the development of their careers, the civil rights movement and other common interests including jazz. Much of this material was published in the collection
Trading Twelves
(2000).
In 1964, Ellison published
Shadow and Act
,
a collection of essays, and began to teach at
Rutgers University
and
Yale University
, while continuing to work on his novel. The following year, a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed
Invisible Man
the most important novel since World War II.
In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his home in
Plainfield, Massachusetts
, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for
Invisible Man
that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel" and, despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book.
[9]
Ellison ultimately wrote more than 2000 pages of this second novel but never finished it.
Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969 he received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom
; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at
New York University
as the
Albert Schweitzer
Professor of Humanities, serving from 1970 to 1980.
In 1975, Ellison was elected to
The American Academy of Arts and Letters
and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's
Langston Hughes Medal
. In 1985, he was awarded the
National Medal of Arts
. In 1986, his
Going to the Territory
was published. This is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist
William Faulkner
and Ellison's friend Rich Wright, as well as the music of
Duke Ellington
and the contributions of African Americans to America’s national identity.
Final years
In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
. Ellison was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, photographer and college professor. He taught at
Bard College
, Rutgers University, the
University of Chicago
, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the
Fellowship of Southern Writers
.
Ralph Ellison died on April 16, 1994, of
pancreatic cancer
, and was buried at
Trinity Church Cemetery
[10]
in the
Washington Heights
neighborhood of
New York City
. He was survived by his wife, Fanny Ellison, who died on November 19, 2005.
After his death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of
Flying Home and Other Stories
in 1996. In 1999, five years after his death, Ellison's second novel,
Juneteenth
, was published under the editorship of
John F. Callahan
, a professor at
Lewis & Clark College
and Ellison's
literary executor
. It was a 368-page condensation of more than 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of forty years. All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively on January 26, 2010, by
Modern Library
, under the title
Three Days Before the Shooting
.
[11]
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