Invisible Man

New Penguin Essentials edition of Ralph Ellison's blistering, impassioned novel of African-American lives in 1940s America, Invisible Man.
'I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.'
Defeated and embittered by a country which treats him as a non-being, the 'invisible man' retreats into an underground cell, where he smokes, drinks, listens to jazz and recounts his search for identity in white society: as an optimistic student in the Deep South, in the north with the black activist group the Brotherhood, and in the Harlem race riots. And explains how he came to be living underground . . .

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma in 1914. He studied music and in 1936 went to live in New York. He started contributing to the Federal Writers' Project (part of Roosevelt's New Deal) and soon his short stories and articles were published. After returning from war service in the Merchant Marines, he concentrated on his writing and, in 1952, his masterpiece Invisible Man was published, seven years after he started it. This established Ellison as a major literary figure. He died in 1994.