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    A Study Guide for Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal"
    A Study Guide for Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal"
    A Study Guide for Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal"
    Ebook44 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535819190
    A Study Guide for Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal" - Gale

      1

      Battle Royal or the Invisible Man

      Ralph Ellison

      1947

      Introduction

      Battle Royal is the name of the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. This first chapter was originally published as a short story in the October 1947 issue of the English literary periodical Horizon and entitled The Invisible Man. Battle Royal is the name adopted by subsequent anthologies to differentiate the story from the novel of the same name.

      Ellison’s novel won him fast and sustained acclaim as a major writer of the twentieth century. The story was well received upon publication and alerted many to Ellison’s talent. Battle Royal presents a startling scene of violence, naivete and economic power—a scene that implies the philosophical depth behind the institutions of racism and the pathos of asserting an identity in the shadow of historical tragedy.

      Author Biography

      With the publication of his novel Invisible Man in 1952, Ralph Ellison became a widely acclaimed author who is considered among the most important writers of the century. In addition to this novel, he published two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) and throughout his life, he was a frequent contributor to literary and political journals including New Masses, Nation, and American Review. After his death, Juneteenth, a novel he had been working on for many years but had not completed, was edited and published posthumously in 1998.

      Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1914 and was named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous American transcen-dentalist writer of the nineteenth century. His father died when Ellison was four years old, and Ellison and his younger brother were raised by their mother who made sure her children had plenty to challenge them intellectually, socially, and culturally. Oklahoma was a source of inspiration to Ellison’s later work. Growing up in the 1920s, he experienced the effects of racial prejudice, formulated in segregative practices of enduring Jim Crow laws. He also was drawn to the vibrant musical forms—jazz, gospel, classical, and folk—that pervaded the city.

      In 1933, the nineteen-year-old Ellison left Oklahoma to attend Booker T. Washington’s former college, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he initially studied music. In 1936, before finishing his degree, Ellison moved to New York where he would eventually meet Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright. Wright, in particular, played an important role in Ellison’s early career. During the thirties, Ellison, like Hughes and Wright, was persuaded by the political and social critiques of the Communist Party. As Ellison’s career continued, he disassociated himself from organized communism while continuing to critique economic exploitation and racism.

      Before receiving a Federal Writers’ Project grant in 1936 that allowed him to focus on his writing, Ellison performed many different kinds

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