After hearing a radio bulletin announce the 1954 Brown v.

Perhaps sensing that he might not live to write a formal autobiography, in the last years of his life Ellison wrote more and more letters that record memories of the people, places, and events of his early years in Oklahoma and what that experience continued to mean in his life and work.Ĭonsider two letters, each from the rich trove of the 1950s, that stake out Ellison’s quest as a person, citizen, and writer. Equally important, and perhaps sometimes more so for what they reveal about his private self and boyhood experience, are letters to old friends and relations from Oklahoma City, that frontier dream world of his childhood to which Ellison returned with increasing frequency: Virgil Branam, Jimmy Stewart, Camille and Mamie Rhone, Charles Etta Tucker, Hester Holloway, H.B.O. Written over six decades, Ellison’s letters range from boyhood notes to his mother to detailed exchanges-and sometimes trenchant sparring matches over ideas-with some of the most distinguished figures of American intellectual and literary life: Richard Wright, Kenneth Burke, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Albert Murray, Saul Bellow, Romare Bearden, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, Harold Bloom, Hugh Kenner. Long after leaving Oklahoma City, this young man from the provinces, who became a sophisticated man of the world, remembers “when I lay on a pallet in the moon-drenched kitchen door and listened and dreamed of the time when I would leave and see the world” (letter to Albert Murray, July 24, 1953).

His story is an African American variation of the American dream. Raised by his mother, Ida, with rigorous love, Ellison grew up in the mostly nurturing, close black community of the vibrant Deep Deuce section of Oklahoma City during the Jim Crow era. Born in 1913, about five and a half years after Oklahoma was admitted to the Union, he lost his father, a protective companion, at the age of three. Ralph Ellison’s life comes close to spanning the 20th century, though as the years go by he casts a glance back to the Civil War and Reconstruction of the 19th century and ahead to the fast-approaching digital age of the 21st.

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