Fanny Ellison, 93; Worked With Husband, Ralph, to Shape ‘Invisible Man’ Into Leading American Novel

Fanny McConnell Ellison, who helped edit husband Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” which is regarded as one of the 20th century’s great novels, has died. She was 93.

Ellison died of complications from hip surgery Nov. 19 at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City.

The poet Langston Hughes arranged for her to meet Ralph Ellison, and the pair were married from 1946 until his death in 1994.

While her husband worked on his book, writing in longhand, she was employed by a charity that supported medical missionary work in Burma.

As Fanny Ellison typed the manuscript, she made editing suggestions, which her husband readily admitted helped shape the book.

Published in 1952, it chronicles the harrowing travels of a nameless black man in the South and New York’s Harlem.

By 1965, she was helping her husband full time, answering correspondence and typing and editing the rough manuscript for a second book that Ralph Ellison never completed.

After his death, she authorized family friend John Callahan to create a novel from more than 2,000 pages of her husband’s notes, and “Juneteenth” was published in 1999.

Fanny Ellison was born Nov. 27, 1911, in Louisville, Ky., and graduated from the University of Iowa. In the mid-1920s she founded the Negro People’s Theater in Chicago.

She married Ligon Buford, a theater colleague, in 1938, but they divorced during World War II. Her marriage to Ellison was also his second. She left no survivors.