Ralph Ellison

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...

This book is a collection of essays and book reviews written and published by Negro novelist and critic Ralph Ellison during the middle years of the 20th Century - the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties, a time of increasing racial tensions between Negroes and whites. "Negro" was the term then in use for African-American, and is the sole term used throughout this book. Its use in this analysis is therefore reflective of this usage, and of the socio-cultural-literary...

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as "a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race," and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and...