invisible mang

BARRON'S BOOK NOTES
RALPH ELLISON'S
INVISIBLE MAN

^^^^^^^^^^RALPH ELLISON: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

In 1952 a first novel by a virtually unknown black American named Ralph Waldo Ellison was published. Reviews of the novel were ecstatic, and in 1953 Ellison's Invisible Man won a prestigious National Book Award for Fiction. Suddenly the author was in great demand for interviews and lectures, and he found himself being compared not only with black writers like Richard Wright, but also with Herman Melville and Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Invisible Man was a phenomenon. In 1965 the phenomenon took on even greater proportions when a group of some 200 authors, critics, and editors named Invisible Man the most distinguished American novel of the previous twenty years.

The passage of time from 1965 to the mid-1980s did little to change the high regard for this remarkable novel. If a similar vote were taken in the mid-1980s, Invisible Man would likely be near th...