Books

New York: Random House, 1952. 439 pages. Second printing of the first edition of this high point of American literature.  An association copy, signed by Ellison and inscribed by him to Frederick Douglass Patterson (and his wife), who had been president of Tuskegee Institute when Ellison was a student there.  The notable inscription reads, "For Dr. and Mrs. F.D. Patterson / With admiration and hope that the fiction herein in no way flaws their memories of the good things we shared, nor the good things they wished for me, when I was a student at Tuskegee/Sincerely/Ralph Ellison/April 1952."  In his 1964 book Shadow and Act,  notes that when he wrote Invisible Man he was especially concerned about poor leadership in the Black community, in which leaders "acknowledged no final responsibility to the Negro community for their acts, and implicit in their roles were constant acts of betrayal. This made for a sad, chronic division between their values and the values of those they were…

A novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952, Invisible Man addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.