Ralph Waldo Ellison was born the grandson of slaves in 1914 in Oklahoma City. He is the author of The Invisible Man (1952), one of the most important and influential postwar American novels. "I blundered into writing," admitted Ellison in a 1961 interview with novelist Richard Stern. From the time he was eight years old, when his mother bought him a used coronet, he wanted to be a musician. He cut grass in exchange for trumpet lessons and worked as an elevator operator for two years at eight dollars a week to save tuition money. When he was finally awarded a music scholarship to Tuskegee Institute, he was unable to afford train passage, so he hopped freight trains all the way from Oklahoma City to Alabama. (1)
             In 1936, Ellison traveled to New York, where he tried unsuccessfully to find work to earn his senior year's tuition. It was here that he met Richard Wright, who encouraged him to try his hand at writing.(2) His very first piece was a book review which was published in Wright's magazine, New Challenge. For a time, Ellison would continue to pursue music, and even experiment with sculpting, but in 1937, his mother's sudden passing away changed Ellison's life forever. He traveled to Cincinnati to keep her company through what he thought was a minor illness, only to find her near death. "She was in such pain that she knew no one," he wrote to friends, "It was the worse thing that has ever happened and I can't explain the emptiness."(4)
             It was this Ellison, alone and distraught in a strange city, that started trying to write. He was befriended by one of the first black lawyers in Dayton, Ohio, Lawyer Stokes (as Ellison referred to him as), who saw him sitting each day in a corner of the local coffee shop writing stories. The friendship grew and in time, Lawyer Stokes offered Ellison the keys to his law offices. It was here, after hours, that Ellison wrote his first short stories and 100 pages of a later abandoned nov
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