Fanny McConnell Ellison

Fanny McConnell Ellison, the wife of author Ralph Ellison, was quite an accomplished woman in her own right. While attending Fisk University as an undergraduate, she worked as an assistant to the poet and novelist, James Weldon Johnson. She left Fisk due to financial reasons. However, she soon received a scholarship from the University of Iowa where she graduated.

Settling in Chicago, she  founded and became the Executive Director of Chicago’s Negro People’s Theater in the late 1930s. At the same time, she wrote a political column, reviews, and essays for the Chicago Defender.

She moved to New York City in 1943 to become the assistant to the director of the National Urban League. Soon she took a new position in the city working at an organization dedicated to supporting the medical missionary work of “Burma surgeon,” Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave.

Fannie McConnell married Ralph Ellison in 1946. It was a marriage that lasted until 1994, when the author died of pancreatic cancer. She was an indispensable partner in his literary work with her strong organizational and editing skills.                 

Wilde on Washington

Oscar Wilde was never one to mince words about America and American heroes. He was at his acerbic best when he wrote the following in his essay “The Decay of Lying,” published in 1891. To wit:

“The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.”