A superb portrait of a generation of black Americans, this novel established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the twentieth century

Ralph Ellison’s blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible ‘simply because people refuse to see me’. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison’s invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual. As John Callahan says, ‘In an extraordinary imaginative leap, he hit upon a single word for the different yet shared condition of African Americans, Americans, and, for that matter, the human individual in the twentieth century and beyond.’

This edition includes Ralph Ellison’s introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel’s seven-year gestation.