Ralph Ellison

Named for Ralph Waldo Emerson by a father who wanted him to be a poet, Ellison first trained as a classical trumpeter at Tuskegee Institute before a summer trip to New York, and a chance meeting with Richard Wright, redirected him toward fiction. He served in the merchant marine during the war while writing Invisible Man in the gaps.

The novel won the National Book Award in 1953 and made him, at forty, a famous man with nothing published since. He spent the next four decades laboring over a second novel; a 1967 house fire destroyed a large stretch of the manuscript, and he never finished rebuilding it. Juneteenth, assembled by his literary executor from thousands of surviving pages, appeared five years after his death.