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Ellison graduated with honors from an all black high school in 1939. In high school, Ellison was quite an extraordinary student. His grades were more than up to par and he served as the first chair of his section in the band and the student conductor. He also played football for the school at the tackle and running back positions. Shortly after graduation, Ralph obtained a scholarship to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to study music and music theory, but after three years, there was a mix-up with his scholarship and he had to stop attending college. At the peak of the Great Depression in 1936, Ellison traveled to New York to study sculpture and to find a summer job to pay for his last year in college. Some of the jobs that he was doing in the summer included serving as a receptionist, food server, and file clerk and factory worker. In 1937, Ralph's mother died in Dayton, Ohio. As expected, he took it extremely hard. He decided that taking some time out with his family would help ease the pain of the loss. That winter, the majority of his time was spent with his brother, Herbert Ellison. When together, they hinted quails in which they sold to General Motor's executives.
In 1937, Ralph met a writer named Richard Wright and they became very close friends in a short period. Wright was one of the first black American authors to protest discrimination against blacks. Richard Wright wrote about white society's negative influence on black culture and joined the Communist party in the 1930s and beginning in 1937 worked as an editor for the party's Daily Worker newspaper in New York City. Ellison wrote his first book in 1939 and named it Slick Gonna Learn. His best-known work, the novel Native Son, which explores how and why a young black man is driven to murder, was published in 1940. Wright left the Communist party in 1944 and later contributed to The God That Failed (1950), a book of essays by former Communists disillusioned with the party.
