March 1, 1913

Ralph Waldo Ellison born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap Ellison. 

July 19, 1916

Lewis Ellison, an ice and coal delivery business owner fatally injured in work accident.  Widowed and poor, Ida takes on added employment as a nursemaid and domestic to support herself and her two sons.

1919

Ellison enters Oklahoma's segregated Frederick Douglass School.

1921

At the age of 8 Ellison receives an old cornet from a neighbor, which sparks a lifelong passion for the instrument and for jazz music.

Image: Oklahoma City Blue Devils jazz band. Prominent members include Lester Young, William "Count" Basie, and Buster Smith. 

1924

Ellison joins Zelia Breaux's Junior High School band where he studies the soprano saxophone and other brass instruments. It is his proficiency as a trumpeter that garners him invitations to play for religious, social, and school functions throughout the city.

1930

Ellison begins advanced trumpet lessons with Ludwig Hebestreit, a white music instructor at nearby Classen Senior High School and conductor for the Oklahoma City Orchestra.  

1932

Ellison graduates with honors and as student band first-chair trumpeter from segregated Frederick Douglass High School.

1933

Ellison leaves Oklahoma for Alabama by freight train and enters Booker T. Washington's  Tuskegee  Institute on a state music scholarship. 

Image: Ellison's Tuskegee entry photograph depicting head wound received while traveling by freight train. Ellison never disclosed the circumstances surrounding the incident.

1936

Ellison spends the summer of 1936 in NYC, working to save money for his final year of tuition at Tuskegee. Unable to save enough money, Ellison never returns to complete his final year of college. 

1937

In New York, Ellison meets poet Langston Hughes who introduces him to writer Richard Wright. With Wright as mentor Ellison begins writing and completes his first short story "Hymie's Bull".

Image: American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist, Langston Hughes, considered a leader in the Harlem Renaissance.  Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.

1937

Ellison's mother, Ida Millsap Ellison Bell, dies in Cincinnati. Ellison stays in Dayton, Ohio with his brother for several months following the funeral.

1938

Returning to New York Ellison meets and marries actress Rose Poindexter. They divorce in 1945.  Aided by Richard Wright, Ellison obtains position working on the New Deal's Federal Writers Project.

Image: Ellison with first wife, ca. 1939.

1939

Ellison begins publishing short stories, essays, and reviews in New Masses and other left-wing publications.

1942

Ellison appointed Negro Quarterly's managing editor.

1943

After not being accepted in the U.S. Navy band, and refusing to be part of the segregated U.S. Army, Ellison joins the U.S. Merchant Marines so he can "contribute to the war but not be in a Jim Crow army". He serves for two years as a cook.

 Image: African-American US Merchant Marine sailors posing with Liberty Ship SS Booker T. Washington's mascot 'Booker', 1943.

1944

Ellison publishes the short stories "King of the Bingo Game", "In a Strange Country", and "Flying Home". 

1944

Based on early sketches for a wartime story, the Rosenwald Foundation awards Ellison a grant to begin his first novel.

1945

While on sick leave from the Merchant Marines, Ellison begins work on his first novel Invisible Man.

1946

Ellison marries Fanny McConnell Buford. Like Ellison, Fanny was from an impoverished background, worked through college, moved to New York, and developed a passion for literature, drama, and the arts. 

Image: Ralph and Fanny Ellison at home in Manhattan, ca. 1972. Photo by Nancy Crampton.

1947

Ellison publishes the opening chapter of Invisible Man in the British journal Horizon.

1952

Random House publishes Ellison's novel Invisible Man.  An instant bestseller, it comes to be regarded as one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century.

Image: First page of Ellison's Invisible Man typescript. 

1953

Ellison wins the National Book Award for Invisible Man. He is the first African-American to receive the prestigious award. 

Image: Ellison at the National Book Awards ceremony with (from left) Fredrick Lewis Allen, Archibald MacLeish, and Bernard DeVoto. AP Images, 1953.

1954

Ellison receives the Rockefeller Foundation Award. Travels to Paris to lecture for the Summer.

1955

Using funds from the Prix de Rome Fellowship awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ellison moves to Rome where he begins work on a second novel.

1958

Ellison returns to the United States and takes position at Bard College as instructor of Russian and American literature. Becomes vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

1960

Ellison publishes "And Hickman Arrives", an excerpt from his projected second novel, in the literary magazine The Noble Savage.

November 28, 1960

Longtime friend Richard Wright dies of a heart attack at the age of 52. 

Image: Richard Wright, author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Wright's work was highly influential in improving race relations in the United States during the mid twentieth century.

1962

Ellison begins teaching creative writing at Rutgers University. 

1963

Ellison receives honorary doctorate of humane letters from Tuskegee Institute. Announces soon to be published second novel.

1964

Ellison publishes Shadow and Act, a collection of essays and reviews drawing from his past two decades of African American political activism and print media in Harlem. Shadow and Act is the first of two major collections published during his lifetime.

1966

Ellison receives honorary doctorate from Rutgers University.

November 29, 1967

Fire at Ellison summer home in the Berkshire Mountains 

destroys a portion of the near complete second novel 

manuscript.

1969

President Lyndon B. Johnson awards Ellison the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Image: Ellison at the White House with President Lyndon Johnson, Henry McPherson, Jr., special council to the President, and Attorney General Ramsey Clark, 1967.

1970

Ellison appointed Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at NYU. Awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et Lettres by French Minister of Cultural Affairs Andrew Malraux.

1975

Ellison speaks at the opening of the Ralph Ellison Public Library in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

1977

Between 1969-1977 Ellison publishes four more installments of his unfinished second novel as "Night Talk" (1969); "A Song of Innocence" (1970); "Cadillac Flambé" (1973); and "Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator" (1977).

1980

Ellison retires from his position at New York University, where he taught for ten years.

Image: Ralph Ellison at home in New York, ca. 1970.

1985

Ellison is awarded the National Medal of Arts

1986

Ellison publishes his second collection of essays Going to the Territory. It is Ellison's last published book during his lifetime.

April 16, 1994

Ralph Ellison dies of pancreatic cancer at age 81 and is buried in Washington Heights, New York.

1995-1996

Ellison family friend John F. Callahan edits and publishes the posthumous collections The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), and the short story collection  Flying Home and Other Stories (1996).

1999

Ellison's second novel Juneteenth is posthumously published. The novel represents a 368 page condensation from over 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of forty years. 

​Image: Ellison with Juneteenth editor, friend, and literary executor John F. Callahan. 

2010

Ellison literary executor John F. Callahan and University of Colorado English professor Adam Bradley coedit and publish the complete manuscript for Ellison's unfinished second novel as Three Days Before the Shooting. 

Image: Ralph Ellison with typewriter at the American Academy in Italy, 1957. Photograph by James Whitmore, Time Life Pictures.