By Greg Mortimer | Tuesday, December 02, 2014 - Off the Shelf

I was a freshman in college when I first read Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, 58 years after he started it in a Vermont barn while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine, 50 after it won the National Book Award, and three after the Modern Library placed it at number 19 on its list of the 20th century’s 100 best novels. In my high school English classes, reading Thoreau had been an eye-opener, to put it lightly. So had Melville’s Bartleby. But Invisible Man jolted me like nothing I’d ever encountered.

 Ellison’s narrator is an unnamed African American man and gifted orator who wins a scholarship to a prestigious black college in the 1930’s American south–but only after his town’s most important white men force him to fight blindfolded against other young black men in the book’s famous “battle royal” scene. Eventually he’s expelled from the college for failing to show a visiting white trustee an idealized version of black life, and he moves to Harlem to search for work. He finds some in a paint factory, only to temporarily lose his memory and ability to speak when he’s caught in a boiler explosion. After a feverish hospital recovery, he’s swept into a current of political upheaval, which offers him the possibility of being a respected public figure. He begins to see how his powerful speeches might help extinguish the dispossession that plagues his race.