"I am a novelist, not an activist," he says, "but I think no one who reads what I write or listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in freedom. As an individual, I am the principal person responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I try to make sense of the chaos." Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1914. His father, Lewis Ellison, was an adventurous and experienced man who had served in the military overseas and then lived in Oklahoma City and worked construction. He started his own ice and coal business. Ellison's mother, Ida Millsap Ellison, was a political activist who campaigned for the Socialist Party and was arrested several times for violating segregation orders. At the time of Ellison's birth, Oklahoma had not been a state for long and was still considered part of the frontier. Lewis and Ida had each been raised in the South by slave parents. When they married, they moved west to Oklahoma, hoping that their children's lives would be better in this state, renowned for its freedom. It wasn't long, however, before Texas and Arkansas prejudice soon fell on Oklahoma. After her husband's death in 1917, Ida supported Ralph and his younger brother, Herbert, by working as a housekeeper at the Avery Chapel Afro-Methodist Episcopal Church. . The family moved into the rectory and Ellison was exposed to the minister's library. Literature was a medium intended for Ellison, whose father named him after the famous American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and hoped that Ellison would also become a poet. His enthusiasm for reading was encouraged... middle of paper... York University. He received prestigious awards such as the Russwurm, the Medal of Freedom and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Despite, or perhaps because of, the overwhelming success of Invisible Man, Ellison never published another novel in his life. Although he published two books of essays – Shadow Act in the 1960s and Going to the Territory in the 1980s – Ellison spent his final decades working on a vast novel, which he never completed. Upon his death in 1994, Ellison left more than 2,000 pages of incomplete and unpublished manuscript. In heavily abridged and edited form, this manuscript was published five years after his death under the title Juneteenth, to generally unfavorable reviews. http://www.answers.com/topic/ralph-ellison http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML. cfm?page=ellison.htmlhttp://lfa.atu.edu/Brucker/Ellison.html