Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award and became one of the most important and influential postwar American novels. He published two volumes of nonfiction, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), which, together with unpublished speeches and writings, were brought together as The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison in 1995. For more than forty years before his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison lived with his wife, Fanny McConnell, in Harlem in New York City.