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"": a Living Story. Ralph Waldo Ellison is perhaps one of the most influential African-American writers of the twentieth century. Ellison is best known for writing about such topics as self-awareness, identity, and the racial repression of African-Americ ....

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.... him as a poet, died when Ellison was three. Ellison’s mother enlisted blacks into the Socialist Party and was also a domestic worker. In the early 1930s, Ellison won a scholarship to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, where he studied music until 1936(Busby 10). Later, to earn money for his education (after a mix-up regarding his scholarship), he traveled to New York, where he met Richard Wright and became involved in the Federal Writer’s Project. Encouraged to write a review for New Challenge, a publication edited by Wright, Ellison began composing essays and stories focusing on the strength of the human spirit and the necessity of racial pride. ....