In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator chronicles his coming of age as a black man in America.
In celebration of Random House’s 100th anniversary, the publisher is reissuing this landmark publication as a hardcover edition featuring bold new cover art, a stunning paper-over-board design, and custom endpapers.
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
In this deeply tragic, richly comic, and profoundly soul-searching story, the narrator chronicles his life from growing up in the South, to college where he is expelled after an encounter with a white trustee, and finally the powerful culmination of his story in Harlem. Invisible Man is a brilliant and uncompromising look at the black man’s position in American society, and “a stunning blockbuster of a book that will floor and flabbergast some people, bedevil and intrigue others, and keep everybody reading right through to its explosive end” (Langston Hughes).
Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the twentieth century. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
