Invisible Man

The lives of countless millions are evoked in Ralph Ellison`s superb portrait of a generation of black Americans, Invisible Man. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by John F. Callahan, as well as an introduction by the author. Ralph Ellison`s blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible `simply because people refuse to see me`. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison`s invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual. As John Callahan says, `In an extraordinary imaginative leap, he hit upon a single word for the different yet shared condition of African Americans, Americans, and, for that matter, the human individual in the twentieth century and beyond.` This edition includes Ralph Ellison`s introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel`s seven-year gestation. Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-94), named for the poet Emerson, was born in Oklahoma. At the age of nineteen he won a scholarship to study music at Booker T. Washington`s Tuskegee Institute. In 1936 he went to New York, where he met the writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; shortly afterwards his stories and articles began to appear in magazines and journals. After the Second World War Ellison was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, allowing him to concentrate on the composition of Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award and established Ellison as a major figure in twentieth-century fiction. If you enjoyed Invisible Man, you might like E.L. Doctorow`s The Book of Daniel, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.