Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant labourer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself, and becoming a photographer. He served as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information (1941-1945) and Life magazine (1948-1972) and found success as a film director, author and composer. The first African-American director to helm a major motion picture, he popularised the Blaxploitation genre through his film Shaft (1971). He wrote numerous memoirs, novels and books of poetry, and received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts, and more than fifty honorary degrees. Parks died in 2006. Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913. He enrolled at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, as a music major and later turned to writing essays and short stories. By 1945 he signed a contract to begin writing what was to become Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award in 1953 but remained the only novel published during his lifetime. Ellison published two subsequent collections of essays: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). Ellison died in 1994.