Don Honors Mentor Ralph Ellison in Black History Month Post
In honor of Black History Month, employees throughout Audible, including Don, have been answering the following question:
Who in Black History has most influenced your life and/or career, and in what ways?
Read Don’s answer, below:
As many who have delved into Audible’s story already know, I credit key elements of Audible’s founding vision to my NYU professor and mentor Ralph Ellison, the brilliant American novelist who wrote Invisible Man. Ralph also inspired and supported my 20-year professional writing career before Audible.
Ralph Ellison’s understanding of the power of the American oral tradition—the way Americans bragged and told stories around campfires and the sound of folks lamenting in the fields—allowed me to understand how American oral culture defined the way American writers expressed themselves.
Ralph Ellison allowed me to learn to hear the music in language, which in turn led to the creation of Audible.
In 1971, when I first met Ralph, I had just read two books that changed me. The first was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which I read in a single afternoon-to-dawn sitting. The second was Invisible Man. Ellison was teaching a small and selective seminar for juniors and seniors, but as a freshman I persisted, and a writer who’d beat out Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to win the National Book Award in 1953 let me join his class of 15 or so students to study the character of the American vernacular.
When my father died suddenly in January of 1973, I moved back to Chicago, and I thought I would stay at the University of Chicago to finish my studies, but Ralph said he would take me on as a tutee and meet with me for several hours every Wednesday afternoon until I graduated if I came back to NYU.
I moved back to New York, and from there one of the greatest American writers taught me how to listen and read deeply.
Much of the work was about how American culture was wrought in such a singular way. I learned from Ralph that Americans worked to create an identity from a synthesis of divergent cultures. I read about how and why we built American buildings and invented American techniques and technologies. The readings and Ralph’s stories and questions helped me recognize how and why Black Americans invented two of the most singularly American art forms—jazz and the blues. From Ralph, at a time when race, racism, and civil rights were part of a fulminating intellectual and moral focus, I felt assured in my belief since childhood that Black Americans were in so many ways better Americans given the best of the nation’s founding principles. He talked often of his own experience and understanding of America and race.
I learned from Ralph that our American experience was derived from the process of a nation constantly making and remaking itself, and that we live in a nation that needed to create its own myths and art and even its own sounds, because we had to. We spent a lot of time considering writing about the special origins of American humor and how “American literacy replaced aristocracy.”
I once told Ralph that my dream would be to be a writer, but I didn’t know anyone growing up in Chicago who made a living as a writer and I didn’t even know if I had the chops to do it. Ralph told me that he had the same doubts when he was young but encouraged me to believe that a writer—and I can so vividly see and hear him telling me this nearly 50 years ago—is simply one who writes.
I did go on to write almost every day and many nights for 20 years. And I even made a living. I wrote with my ears, because of the way Ralph helped me understand the power and the music in language.
I ultimately left the writing life to start a company. Ralph died in 1994. He didn’t get to see my crazy idea, formulated that year, become Audible. Today, as millions of people listen to well-composed and artfully performed words from Audible, I sense Ralph would have understood my decision to diverge from a writing life to create a company defined by cultural and social purpose.