Books with author Ralph Ellison

SIZE: 5 x 7 ½ (approximately) PAGES: 439 pages. BACKGROUND/DESCRIPTION: Reprint Edition but possible First Edition for Modern Library. THE MODERN LIBRARY, NY 1952. The best of the world's best books. ML338 is on the front flap under the price. THIS IS POSSIBLY ONE OF THE BEST WRITTEN BOOKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY. WRITTEN BY ONE OF THE GREATEST AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTHORS OF THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching--yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it.After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience of the hero's high school days, moves quickly to the campus of a Southern Negro college and then to New York's Harlem, where most of the action takes place. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed--as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity of the blindness of others. Invisible Man is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization; it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the Negro's anomalous position in American society.

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.

Masterpiece about the plight of an African-American man. First published in 1952. Invisible Man tells of a nameless, protagonist's epic journey from the painful paradoxes of a white-run southern black college to Harlem, from a brush with token membership in the Communist Party to a toxic Long Island paint plant, and finally to the anonymity of the basement of an abandoned building, where he goes mad.