Oklahoma's Ralph Ellison Centennial Celebration will recognize one of its most famous literary figures on his 100th birthday through public events.

A native of Oklahoma City, Ellison is an internationally renowned writer, author of the 1953 National Book Award-winning novel Invisible Man; numerous short stories; essays on jazz, literature, and American culture collected in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986); and his posthumous novels Juneteenth and Three Days before the Shooting. 

Oklahoma City community partners are working collaboratively and individually to organize public events in a variety of venues to celebrate Ralph Ellison and his world from February 2013 through April 2014.

Novelist Ralph Waldo Ellison originally studied music and art but was drawn eventually to the world of literature. Ellison spent seven years writing Invisible Man (1952, National Book Award), and, although it was his only novel, it gained him a place as a respected American writer and remains one of the central texts of the twentieth-century canon.  More>