Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913. His love of music led him to enroll at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, as a music major. In 1936 he visited New York City, where he befriended established authors and intellectuals who encouraged him to pursue a career in writing. He joined the Federal Writers’ Project and began contributing essays and short stories for publications such as New Masses, The Negro Quarterly, The New Republic and Saturday Review. By 1945 he had signed a contract to write what was to become Invisible Man (1952); it won the National Book Award in 1953 but remained his only novel published during his lifetime. He published two subsequent collections of essays, (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). For many years Ellison worked on a second novel, which he never completed; its central narrative was published posthumously as Three Days Before the Shooting ... in 2010. Ellison died in 1994.