Editorial Reviews
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We rely, in this world, on the
visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph
Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment
it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of
its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish
levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a
context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am
an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see
only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed,
everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge,
earned over the course of many years.
As the book gets started, the narrator is
expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white
trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous
farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the
dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please
a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting
around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where
the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns
that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of
condemnation.
What ensues is a search for what truth actually
is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman
for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and
believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been
duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only
another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were
blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And
because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought
they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in
reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."
Invisible Man is certainly a book about
race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have
disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow
definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to
identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever
be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The
world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible
man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this
which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak
for you?" --Melanie Rehak
From Publishers Weekly
These three volumes have been
redesigned and reissued to commemorate the first anniversary of Ellison's
death. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Wright Morris
Invisible Man belongs on the shelf with the
classical efforts man has made to chart the river Lethe from its mouth to
its source.
Book Description
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.
Ingram
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. Reissue.
30,000 first printing. NYT.
From the Back Cover
"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
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.
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