While attending Douglass High School, he also found time to play on the school's football team. However, the family life was precarious, and Ralph worked various jobs during his youth and teens to assist with family support. Ida remarried three times after Lewis died. From the father of a neighborhood friend, he received free lessons for playing trumpet and alto saxophone, and would go on to become the school bandmaster. According to Ellison, his mother felt that 'my brother and I would have a better chance of reaching manhood if we grew up in the north.' When she did not find a job and her brother lost his, the family returned to Oklahoma, where Ellison worked as a busboy, a shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, and a dentist's assistant. In 1921, Ellison's mother and her children moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother. Ralph later discovered, as an adult, that his father had hoped he would grow up to be a poet.

The elder Ellison loved literature, and doted on his children. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died in 1916, after an operation to cure internal wounds suffered after shards from a 100-lb ice block penetrated his abdomen, when it was dropped while being loaded into a hopper. He was the second of three sons firstborn Alfred died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice (or Millsap) was born in 1916. Her husband Lewis lived in an apartment in a large rooming house owned by J. Oklahoma City's 407 East First Street buzzed with excitement as Ida Ellison, whom close friends called “Brownie,” neared term in early 1913. Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at 407 NE 1st Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap, on March 1, 1913. The New York Times dubbed him 'among the gods of America's literary Parnassus.' A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left upon his death. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). Ralph Ellison (Ma – April 16, 1994) was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.

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