General correspondence; organizational correspondence and reports; drafts, notes, and production files for novels, essays, poetry, short stories, reviews, and other writings; speeches, lectures, and interviews; reference file; Ellison and McConnell family papers; and other papers documenting Ellison's career and development as a writer. Among the many works represented are Going to the Territory (1985), Invisible Man (1952), and Shadow and Act (1964). Includes material on Ellison's affiliations with such charitable, cultural, and educational institutions as Bennington College, Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Museum of the City of New York, New School for Social Research, and Wake Forest University. Also documented are his research for the Federal Writers' Project and his many teaching assignments. Subjects include art, civil rights, literature, music, politics, and sports. Papers of his wife, Fanny McConnell Ellison, pertain to her work for the American Medical Center for Burma; her contributions as one of the founders of the Negro People's Theatre, Chicago, Ill.; and African Americans in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Correspondents include Romare Bearden, Saul Bellow, Harry Brooks, Harold Calicutt, John Cheever, John Ciardi, Kenneth Bancroft Clark, Henry B.O. Davis, William Levi Dawson, Paul Engle, Michel Fabre, Michael S. Harper, John Hersey, Langston Hughes, Phoebe Hyman, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson, James Weldon Johnson, James Alan McPherson, Albert Murray, Joseph F. Newhall, Myron Donald Olmanson, Nathan A. Scott, Gordon Stifler Seagrave, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Wright.