Both a deeply compelling bestselling novel and an epic milestone of American literature. Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The book’s nameless narrator describes growing up in a black … growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood”, before retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
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I read this book in college and it remains one of my all time favorites. In this work, Ellison paints a searing portrait of the alienation and displacement of one man, by tapping into the humanity of every man. When writing about race, he doesn’t mince words, but explores its complexities in a way that transcends the subject matter – in language …
This is a great novel that will introduce most to new experiences of reality. Specifically, realities that are common to Blacks living in America. Ellison is at times uproariously funny, at times capable of raising the hair on the back of the reader’s neck. Ellison is sympathetic and compassionate but never maudlin or partisan to any race or style …
This has been a difficult novel for me to rate. It is a deservedly modern classic and powerful story about a Black man’s experiences in America’s south and north. The problem is that I found the story intermittently sluggish, which is likely the result of THIS crotchety older reader’s impatience with protracted descriptive passages and internal …
I did not like this book and did not finish it.
Classic Black literature, very relevant today.
Couldn’t put it down until I finished it!
A Masterpiece!!
Ralph Ellison opened my eyes to how fiction can reflect truth in real life.
Growing up as ‘the other,’ it is hard to be in a society that renders you invisible. This book captures the African American experience from the past that is still painfully relevant in the present. This book is a literary classic and a must read for anyone in America today.
In our current political and social climate, this book is a potent and concrete reminder that the more things change, the more things stay the same. It helps us realize that it is important to know our history or be doomed to repeat it.
One of the precursors to the Beat movement in literature and the rise and dominance of Post-Modernism in the 60s and 70s, Invisible Man also manages to remain timely year after year, and perhaps in not an entirely good way, since it takes place over fifty years ago and is about the Black hero’s attempts to rise above the destructive effects of …
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an “invisible man”. People saw in him only a reflection of …
I had a very happy and great time reading this page turning thriller..! It’s one more book that I’d like or love to purchase/borrow again and maybe another time too! I highly recommend it!
Thought Provoking
Tried reading this. It was gawdawful, gave up.
One of the most profound, shocking, moving, and outraging books I have ever read. This book is in my top five all-time favorite novels.
One of the best reading experiences ever was to contrast Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with H.G. Well’s Invisible Man. One was the inability to be seen because of the mental blindness caused by stereotypes, the other was physical invisibility. The topic is quite thought-provoking.
Hard to fit into a sound bite. Gulliver’s Travels, written by a black man so brilliant that he didn’t need to hide behind Lilliput, etc., but only the world as it is. An acid satire with the flow of the finest improvisational jazz.
The book is a piece of poetry, a masterpiece, a supremely human accomplishment. It twists the soul, all the way …
Can a novel you read in your early 20s effect you in the same manner when you re-read it in your mid-40s?
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison gives this reviewer a split verdict to the aforementioned question. It is the story of an unnamed protagonist who leaves the American South in search of a better life in Harlem. The two-sided coin of overt and …