Ralph Waldo Ellison born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap Ellison.
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.
Ellison enters Oklahoma's segregated Frederick Douglass School.
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.
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.
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.
Ellison graduates with honors and as student band first-chair trumpeter from segregated Frederick Douglass High School.
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.
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.
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.
Ellison's mother, Ida Millsap Ellison Bell, dies in Cincinnati. Ellison stays in Dayton, Ohio with his brother for several months following the funeral.
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.
Ellison begins publishing short stories, essays, and reviews in New Masses and other left-wing publications.
Ellison appointed Negro Quarterly's managing editor.
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.
Ellison publishes the short stories "King of the Bingo Game", "In a Strange Country", and "Flying Home".
Based on early sketches for a wartime story, the Rosenwald Foundation awards Ellison a grant to begin his first novel.
While on sick leave from the Merchant Marines, Ellison begins work on his first novel Invisible Man.
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.
Ellison publishes the opening chapter of Invisible Man in the British journal Horizon.
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.
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.
Ellison receives the Rockefeller Foundation Award. Travels to Paris to lecture for the Summer.
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.
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.
Ellison publishes "And Hickman Arrives", an excerpt from his projected second novel, in the literary magazine The Noble Savage.
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.
Ellison begins teaching creative writing at Rutgers University.
Ellison receives honorary doctorate of humane letters from Tuskegee Institute. Announces soon to be published second novel.
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.
Ellison receives honorary doctorate from Rutgers University.
Fire at Ellison summer home in the Berkshire Mountains
destroys a portion of the near complete second novel
manuscript.
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.
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.
Ellison speaks at the opening of the Ralph Ellison Public Library in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
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).
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.
Ellison is awarded the National Medal of Arts
Ellison publishes his second collection of essays Going to the Territory. It is Ellison's last published book during his lifetime.
Ralph Ellison dies of pancreatic cancer at age 81 and is buried in Washington Heights, New York.
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).
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.
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.