The life’s work of the famed writer Ralph Ellison has a new owner charged with stewarding his legacy.
Bard College, a liberal arts school in Hudson River Valley of New York, announced its Ralph Ellison Center on Wednesday — aimed at inspiring scholarship around the “Invisible Man” author’s oeuvre. With the founding of the center, which is an academic initiative rather than a physical building, the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust has donated all rights and royalties to the school, where Ellison formerly taught.
“It was a one-way street,” said Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer for the trust. “We gave them everything.”
Raised in segregated Oklahoma, Ellison studied music at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before an extended stay in New York City and encounters with luminaries like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes led him down a literary path.
In 1952, Ellison released his landmark novel — the only one he published in his lifetime — “Invisible Man,” about a nameless Black man navigating the fraught racial landscape of midcentury America. It won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction and appeared on many a school syllabus.
Since Ellison’s death in 1994, more of his work has been released through the efforts of John Callahan, literary executor of his estate, and the charitable trust, which was formed in the will of his widow, Fanny McConnell Ellison. Posthumous publications included Ellison’s second novel “Juneteenth,” as well as collections of his letters, essays and photographs.
Bard aligned with the trust, Zaretsky said, in its appreciation of Ellison as an interdisciplinary artist. The new center will celebrate him not only as a writer, but as a musician, sculptor, poet — and Bard instructor.
Zaretsky estimated the trust’s net assets at about $3.6 million, including literary copyrights valued at more than $600,000. The total royalties are a “consistent revenue stream” that he said he believed would benefit the new center. The bulk of the royalties the trust received over the years came from “Invisible Man,” he added.
Zaretsky said the rights transfer was the natural next step in keeping Ellison’s work alive.
“We were really focused on Ellison and making sure that his legacy was handled with the seriousness that it deserved, and we felt very good about that,” he said. “But then we reached a point where we felt like, well, that phase of our work, after 20 years, was largely complete.”
In this next phase, Zaretsky said, the idea is to generate scholarship about Ellison and his pursuits across literature and the visual and performing arts.
“If anyone is going to come up with some fresh approaches and angles,” he said, “this is the right kind of laboratory for that to happen.”
Zaretsky added that partnering with a school, especially one Ellison had ties to, was a natural choice, given the value that the writer and his wife placed on education. It was something the lawyer said he spoke with her about before she died.
“That’s another reason we feel really good about this,” Zaretsky said. “We gave them what they wanted.”
Nicholas Lewis, an associate dean of Bard College, will head the new center. Zaretsky and Callahan have been named senior fellows.
The center’s flagship event will be a biannual lecture series in three parts — one on Bard’s campus, one in New York City and one at a partner historically Black college or university, or H.B.C.U.
The Ellison archive, which is held at the Library of Congress in Washington, is being digitized as part of the center’s work. Lewis said he hoped to make the digital repository accessible to the public, with the center also supporting further contributions.
“We want people to really encounter the handiwork of Ellison,” Lewis said.
Bard is also creating a paid internship program in which students from across the Bard network and partner H.B.C.U.s will spend one week on the school’s campus, and then travel to the Library of Congress and support the digitization project while pursuing independent research.
For many students, especially those for whom in-person academic study was limited during the pandemic, Lewis said, that kind of material encounter is “quite literally magic for the classroom in terms of inspiring a renewed kind of engagement.”
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