Inscription in Invisible Man from Ellison to William Levi Dawson

At the zenith of Dawson's own career in 1934, the year of the premiere of his Negro Folk Symphony, Dawson's most famous student, the insecure young Ralph Ellison, was already beginning to resent his teacher who--Ellison felt--should have been his foremost champion. Within two years of Dawson's triumph, Ellison fled Tuskegee, Dawson, and the South in a rage that would begin to abate with the publication in 1952 of his brilliant novel, Invisible Man. Only at the zenith of his own career, with the extraordinary reception given that work, could Ellison look back with sweet irony on Dawson as perhaps the mentor he had, in fact, needed at the time. Dawson’s copy of Invisible Man, held by Emory University, is inscribed “For William L. Dawson—Who before I knew him inspired me, and who after I came to Tuskegee taught me by example the discipline of the writer—with Gratitude, Ralph Ellison, June 1953.” In subsequent years, the two men became good friends. In the archives at Emory University, researchers may listen to a tribute speech to Dawson given by Ralph Ellison on December 4, 1971, for the Tuskegee-Philadelphia Alumni Chapter Golden Anniversary Dinner.