American · b. 1913
National Book Award 1953; Presidential Medal of Freedom 1969
Ralph Ellison was an American novelist whose Invisible Man is one of the most important and technically accomplished novels in the American literary canon.
Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952, won the National Book Award, and spent the remaining forty years of his life working on a second novel he never completed. That the second novel never appeared should not diminish the achievement of the first: Invisible Man is a book of extraordinary ambition and accomplishment, a work that draws on African American vernacular traditions, jazz, blues, surrealism, and the entire Western literary canon to create something that belongs to all of those traditions while being reducible to none of them.
The novel’s unnamed narrator — a Black man in mid-century America who is “invisible” because white society refuses to see him as an individual — moves from the Deep South through Harlem, encountering a series of institutions and ideologies (a Southern Black college, the Communist-like Brotherhood, Black nationalism) that offer frameworks for understanding his situation without ever granting him genuine selfhood. Ellison uses this picaresque structure to examine the full complexity of Black American life in the twentieth century, refusing both sentimentality and simple political prescription. The prose is dense, allusive, and often dazzling.
Ellison’s reputation is occasionally complicated by the contrast between his one major novel and his incomplete second project, and by certain political disagreements with other Black writers and intellectuals — his complex relationship to the Black Arts Movement generated significant controversy. The posthumously assembled second novel, Juneteenth (1999), edited from thousands of pages of manuscript by John Callahan, is interesting but incomplete. None of this diminishes Invisible Man, which is simply one of the great American novels, and which rewards re-reading at every stage of a reader’s life.
by Ralph Ellison
An unnamed Black man's journey from the South through Harlem, joining and leaving organisations that all fail to see him as an individual — a meditation on identity, race, and visibility in America.
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by Ralph Ellison
Ellison's collection of essays on literature, music, and American identity — written over twenty years — is the essential companion to Invisible Man. The essays on jazz and blues argue that African American music is the central achievement of American culture; the literary essays situate Ellison's novel within the tradition of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Dostoevsky; and the autobiographical pieces account for the Oklahoman who became one of the great American novelists.
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by Ralph Ellison
A white senator who was raised as a Black child by a Black preacher in the American South is shot on the floor of the Senate and, as he lies dying, remembers his childhood with Reverend Hickman. Ellison's posthumously published second novel — assembled from forty years of manuscript — is flawed and incomplete but contains passages equal to anything in Invisible Man, and the central figure of the Black minister who raised a white child is among the most complex moral situations in American fiction.
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Ralph Ellison's complete bibliography in order — from Invisible Man to Juneteenth and Shadow and Act. Best starting points for new readers.
guide
Where to start with Ralph Ellison — whether to begin with Invisible Man, Shadow and Act, or Juneteenth. A complete reading guide to the great American novelist.
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