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Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man Cover

Awards

Winner of the 1953 National Book Award

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, 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 nameless narrator of the novel 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", and 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, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

Review:

"With this book the author maps a course from the underground world into the light. Invisible Man belongs on the shelf with the classical efforts man has made to chart the river Lethe from its mouth to its source." The New York Times Book Review, Wright Morris

Review:

"The Negro American experience...is indispensable to any profoundly American depiction of reality...This background provides the black writer with much to write about. As fictional material it rivals that of the nineteenth-century Russians." Ralph Ellison

Review:

"A book of the very first order, a superb book." Saul Bellow

Review:

"Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity — powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly humorous gusto." Atlantic Monthly

Review:

"Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, a work often cited as the American novel of its time." William Corbett, Author of New York Literary Lights

Review:

"Invisible Man is an essential book, whether read as an intriguing coming-of-age story, an incisive portrait of an individual's quest for identity, or a powerful indictment of the absurdity of racism that remains fresh and relevant today. Ellison's stylish prose speaks to the individual and collective need to acquire self-knowledge, self-definition, self-illumination?to become visible to ourselves." Sacred Fire

Synopsis:

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.

About 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. Invisible Man won the National Book Award  and the Russwurm Award. Appointed to the Academy of American Arts and Letters in 1964, Ellison taught at many colleges including Bard College, the University of Chicago, and New York University where he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities from 1970 through 1980. Ralph Ellison died in 1994.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
randyllewis, January 27, 2007 (view all comments by randyllewis)
Great book!
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(13 of 29 readers found this comment helpful)

Product Details

ISBN:
9780679732761
Introduction:
Ellison, Ralph Waldo
Author:
Ellison, Ralph Waldo
Introduction:
Ellison, Ralph Waldo
Author:
Ellison, Ralph Waldo
Author:
Ralph Ellison
Publisher:
Vintage Books USA
Location:
New York :
Subject:
General
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Classics
Subject:
Novels and novellas
Subject:
American fiction (fictional works by one author)
Subject:
Afro-americans
Subject:
Race relations
Subject:
Blacks
Subject:
Literature, Modern
Subject:
African Americans
Subject:
Afro-Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964 -- Fiction.
Subject:
American fiction (fictional works by one auth
Subject:
African American men
Copyright:
Edition Number:
2
Edition Description:
2nd Vintage International ed.
Series Volume:
no. 1191
Publication Date:
March 1995
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
608
Dimensions:
8.04x5.24x1.08 in. .99 lbs.

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