Ralph Waldo Ellison
Ralph Ellison was born in the year 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He developed a love for jazz at an early age and pursued music at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an essential university for black education in the United States. The improvisation found in jazz music would affect the way he wrote Invisible Man, a book often referred to as having a range of different writing styles and tones.
Ellison became a member of the New York Federal Writers Program where he made friends with many popular writers known today such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. While in New York City, he wrote a number of short stories and articles for publications like "New Masses" and "The Negro Quarterly." Ralph Ellison later served in World War II through cooking as a Merchant Marine.
Through Ellison's experiences as a musician, writer, and cook in the War, Invisible Man was written under the impact of existentialism, an ideal that ponders individual in a world without meaning.