Ralph Ellison was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, the grandson of slaves, Ellison and his younger brother were raised by their mother, whose husband died when Ralph was 3 years old.

He was an African-American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.

With the outbreak of World War II, Ellison joined the U.S. Merchant Marine as a cook, saw action in the North Atlantic and began to think of writing a major novel. However, not until after the war did he begin writing what was to become “Invisible Man.”

Invisible Man is a novel by Ralph Ellison, published by Random House in 1952. It is the story of a young black man from the South who does not fully understand racism in the world. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.

From the time Invisible Man first appeared in 1952, it was a popular and critical success. On the best-seller list for 16 weeks, in 1953 the novel won the National Book Award. And more than 40 years later, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow declared, “This book holds its own among the best novels of the century.”

The novel’s special quality is its deft combination of existential inquiry into identity as such—what it means to be socially or racially invisible—with a more sociopolitical allegory of the history of the African-American experience in America. The first-person narrator remains nameless, retrospectively recounting his shifts through the surreal reality of surroundings and people from the racist South to the no less inhospitable world of New York City.

“And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.”

In this quote from the Epilogue, the narrator very neatly encapsulates the main source of his difficulties throughout the twenty-five chapters of the novel. He has not been himself and has not lived his own life but rather has allowed the complexity of his identity to be limited by the social expectations and prejudices of others. He has followed the ideology of the college and the ideology of the Brotherhood without trusting or developing his own identity. Now, however, he has realized that his own identity, both in its flexibility and authenticity, is the key to freedom.

I think it is a great work of fiction, it combined allusions to great works of literature with keen insight into the complex psychology and painful social reality of being a black man in mid-20th century America. Moreover, it is engaging, mysterious, funny, sad, brainy, and honest. In short, it's a must-read.

I think this is a good question for the author because he addressed a lot of racism problems in the novel.


White, in the story, exercise their power of being White by discriminating Black through racist acts which dehumanize them as a human. They look down upon Black and treat them as non-human being. Whiteness is the idea of being white and of having inherent privileges. This privilege of being white has created inequality or injustice among other races in society.