Invisible Man

Invisible Man is a novel written by Ralph Ellison, developed from a short story that formed the novel's initial "Battle Royal" chapter. It was Ellison's only novel to be published during his lifetime, and it won him the National Book Award in 1953. The novel addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing the post-civil-war American Black identity, including the relationship between this identity and Marxism, black nationalism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington. ''Time'' magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. According to a famous essay in the Modern Library's 30th Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man, Ellison says that he started writing Invisible Man in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont in the Summer of 1945 where he was on sick leave from the Merchant Marines and that the novel continued to preoccupy him in many various parts of New York City. In an interview in the Paris Review in 1955, Ellison... full article at wikipedia