As a boy, Ralph Waldo Ellison announced that his ambition was to become a Renaissance man. "I was taken very early," he would write, "with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond." Ellison was born on March I, 1914, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Ida Millsap and Lewis Ellison, who died when Ralph was three. Ellison's mother worked tirelessly to provide a stimulating environment for Ralph and his brother, and her influence on the writer was profound.

In 1933, at the age of nineteen, Ellison hopped a freight train to Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, where he majored in music. In the summer of 1935 he traveled north to New York City to earn money for his last year in college; he never returned to Tuskegee. Instead, be stayed in New...