Invisible Man won the National Book Award and the Russwurm Award. Review Quotes A book of the very first order, a superb book.-Saul BellowĪbout The Author Ralph Ellison was born in Okalahoma and trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936, at which time a visit to New York and a meeting with Richard Wright led to his first attempts at fiction. Eliot's The Waste Land, James Joyce, and Dostoevsky. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. The book's nameless narrator describes 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. 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. About the Book An African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.īook Synopsis Both a deeply compelling bestselling novel and an epic milestone of American literature.

Ralph ellison books