Invisible Man

Invisible Man is the first novel of the American writer Ralph Ellison, and the only one published during his lifetime. The novel was issued in 1952.

The narrator is a young black man from the South who goes to college full of hope about his future and is expelled for showing one of the college's white benefactors a part of black existence that the institution keeps hidden. He moves to New York and settles in Harlem, where he becomes an orator for the Communist party, known in the novel as the Brotherhood, and is caught between the praise he receives and the danger of his position. As he works for the organisation he meets a succession of people who force him towards the truth about racism and about his own lack of a settled identity, and when racial tensions in Harlem build into a riot he is pulled into the middle of it. The book is written as a first-person account of one man's education in the country he lives in, and its subject is the social and intellectual position of African Americans in the early twentieth century.

The novel takes up black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial politics associated with Booker T. Washington, along with the questions of individuality and personal identity that run through the whole of it.