Ralph Waldo Ellison was born March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Ellison attended Frederick Douglass School in Oklahoma City, receiving lessons in symphonic composition. He began playing the trumpet at 8 years old and, when he was 18, attended Tuskegee Institute in Montgomery, Alabama, studying music. Throughout those years he worked at many different types of jobs, including janitor, shoeshine boy, jazz musician, and freelance photographer. He also became a game hunter to keep himself alive, a skill he says he learned from reading Hemingway. Although Ellison did not stay at this college, he went to 3 other prestigious colleges to receive 12 honorary doctorate degrees.
Ralph Ellison wrote the words "I am an invisible man." He spent the next seven years exploring the meaning of those five words, and when he finally figured it out he began the wonderful and well known novel and it progressed from there. Invisible Man is Ellison's unique and knowledgeable novel of a nameless African-American man navigating the dangers and prejudices of pre-Civil Rights Movement America.