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(b. March 1, 1914, Oklahoma City, Okla., U.S.–d. April 16, 1994, New York, N.Y.), American teacher and writer who won eminence with his first and only novel, Invisible Man (1952).
Ellison left Tuskegee Institute (Alabama) in 1936 after three years’ study of music and joined the Federal Writers’ Project in New York City. In 1939 he began contributing short stories, reviews, and essays to various periodicals. Following service in World War II, he produced Invisible Man, which won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction. The story tells of a naive and idealistic Southern black youth who goes to Harlem, joins the fight against white oppression, and ends up ignored by his fellow blacks as well as by whites. After his novel appeared, Ellison published only two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986).
He lectured widely on black culture, folklore, and creative writing and taught at various American colleges and universities. He left a second novel unfinished at his death. Flying Home and Other Stories was published posthumously in 1996.
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(b. c. 1753, Senegal, West Africa–d. Dec. 5, 1784, Boston, Mass., U.S.), the first black woman poet of note in the United States.
She was sold from a slave ship in Boston in 1761 to work for the family of John Wheatley, a merchant. The Wheatleys soon recognized her talents and gave her privileges unusual for a slave, allowing her to learn to read and write. At the age of 14 she began to write poetry, and her first published work, “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine . . . George Whitefield” (1770), attracted much attention. In 1773 her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in England under the sponsorship of the Countess of Huntingdon, and Wheatley’s reputation spread in Europe as well as in America. A poem published in 1776, dedicated to George Washington, brought her further acclaim.
The dissolution of the Wheatley family by death left Phillis Wheatley alone, and in April 1778 she married John Peters, a free black man who failed in business and apparently also failed to support Phillis and her children. At the end of her life she was working as a servant, and she died in poverty.
Wheatley’s poetry, largely concerned with morality and piety, was conventional for its time. Her significance stems from the attention that she drew to her successful education. Her poems were reissued in the 1830s by Abolitionists eager to prove the human potential of blacks.
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Born in 1930, Ornette Coleman started playing the alto sax at the age of 14. His first gigs were backing up musicians like Big Joe Turner and Pee Wee Crayton. His first LP was with Don Cherry in 1958 and he later signed with Atlantic Records. By 1959 and for the next five years, he toured clubs around the country. Unhappy with the money, he returned to New York and in 1971 he opened his own club, Artist House. He was the master of free jazz, which was more abstract and had fewer musical boundaries than any other form of avant garde jazz. It was not thought of in the beginning as a true art form and Ornette was one of the main shapers in its acceptance. It slowly made its way into the hearts of jazz fans and by 1959 it was an accepted art form.
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Born in 1915, Muddy Waters was the king of Postwar Chicago Blues. One of 10 children and the son of a sharecropper, he got his nickname because he loved to play down by a muddy creek as a child. He learned to sing out in the cotton fields he worked in and started playing the guitar when he was 17. Inspired by Son House and Robert Johnson, he began to build his style. Waters left his mark on untold numbers of bluesmen and blues rockers, both American and British. He was responsible for the melding of the Mississippi Delta Blues and the urban Chicago Blues. To many blues fans, he IS the blues. His first recording was in 1941. Muddy Waters died of a heart attack in his sleep in 1983.
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In the early 1900s, particularly in the 1920s, African-American literature, art, music, dance, and social commentary began to flourish in Harlem, a section of New York City. This African-American cultural movement became known as “The New Negro Movement” and later as the Harlem Renaissance. More than a literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique culture of African-Americans and redefined African-American expression. African-Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage.
The main factors contributing to the development of the Harlem Renaissance were African-American urban migration, trends toward experimentation throughout the country, and the rise of radical African-American intellectuals.
The Harlem Renaissance transformed African-American identity and history, but it also transformed American culture in general. Never before had so many Americans read the thoughts of African-Americans and embraced the African-American community’s productions, expressions, and style.
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1909?1959. b. Woodville, Miss. He played the tenor saxophone with various bands (1929?40), including those of Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie, with whom he first recorded in 1936. Young and Coleman Hawkins are considered the major influences on tenor-saxophone playing, and Young’s style was important in the development of progressive, or cool, jazz, which arose in the late 1940s. He won several jazz polls and made a number of records, including a series with Billie Holiday, who gave him his nickname, ?President,? later shortened to ?Pres? or ?Prez.?
