![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Long after leaving Oklahoma City, this young man from the provinces, who became a sophisticated man of the world, remembers “when I lay on a pallet in the moon-drenched kitchen door and listened and dreamed of the time when I would leave and see the world” (letter to Albert Murray, July 24, 1953). ![]() His story is an African American variation of the American dream. Raised by his mother, Ida, with rigorous love, Ellison grew up in the mostly nurturing, close black community of the vibrant Deep Deuce section of Oklahoma City during the Jim Crow era. Born in 1913, about five and a half years after Oklahoma was admitted to the Union, he lost his father, a protective companion, at the age of three. Ralph Ellison’s life comes close to spanning the 20th century, though as the years go by he casts a glance back to the Civil War and Reconstruction of the 19th century and ahead to the fast-approaching digital age of the 21st. ![]()
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