Novel
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952
Synopsis
The narrator, who never gives his name, tells his story from a cellar lit by 1,369 light bulbs. A young Black man from the South and a gifted speaker, he delivers his speech before the white notables of his town after being made to box blindfolded, and receives a scholarship to a Black college. He is expelled from it for having taken Mr Norton, a white trustee of the college, to the farmer Trueblood and to the Golden Day, goes to New York with letters from Dr Bledsoe that work against him, joins a paint factory famous for its white, then becomes, in Harlem, the speaker of the Brotherhood.
Context
Begun in the summer of 1945 in Vermont, during a leave from the merchant marine, the novel takes seven years; his wife Fanny types the manuscript and helps him to live. Published by Random House on 14 April 1952, it stays sixteen weeks on the bestseller list and in 1953 receives the National Book Award, ahead of Ernest Hemingway. A 1965 survey names it the most important novel since the war. In 1967, a fire destroys part of the second novel; the biographer Arnold Rampersad considers that Ellison exaggerated the loss.
Who it is for
A long novel, in the first person, that changes register from one episode to the next. Two French translations, in 1954 and in 1969.
Prizes and reception
National Book Award 1953, the first awarded to a Black novelist; the Modern Library ranks it nineteenth among the century's novels in English.
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