In the summer of 1936, when he was 22 years old, Ralph Ellison went to New York with a plan: to earn enough money to fund his senior year at Tuskegee Institute, where he was majoring in music and expected to become a professional musician. But then he met the writer Richard Wright and the plan, as they say, went bust. Sixteen years later, Ellison published
Invisible Man, a tour de force that went on to become a hallmark of American literature. The rest is history. March 1 is Ellison's birthday -- and had a chance friendship not changed the trajectory of Ellison's career goals, who knows what we might have know him for? Check out
Invisible Man, as well as Ellison's other long, ultimately unfinished work of fiction,
Juneteenth, or his
collected essays in our circulating collection.
