Ralph Ellison
"If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he's lost the battle before he takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that
goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance but it must be on his own terms.” -Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison was an African American author whose widely appreciated and critically acclaimed novel, Invisible Man, was published in 1954. As a young man, Ellison described himself as a young Renaissance Man, a man who looked to culture and intellectualism as a source of identity. This is what sparked his interest in writing Invisible Man, a book with themes of self-discovery and identity as its major themes. Invisible Man was a controversial novel frequently banned from being read in school due to its explicit content describing the "real life" African American communities and cultures. Literary critics, however, praised the novel for its raw description of history and its timeless significance.
Ellison received the following awards for Invisible Man:
National Book Award (1953)
Russwurm Award (1953)
Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship to Rome (1955-1957)
Medal of Freedom (1969)
Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et Lettres (1970)