Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
111 Rating(s)
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Invisible Man

Author: Ralph Ellison

Narrator: Joe Morton

Unabridged: 31 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/21/2010


Synopsis

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching--yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it.

After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience of the hero's high school days, moves quickly to the campus of a Southern Negro college and then to New York's Harlem, where most of the action takes place. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed--as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity of the blindness of others.

Invisible Man is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization; it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the Negro's anomalous position in American society.

About The Author

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) was born in Oklahoma and trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936, at which time a visit to New York and a meeting with Richard Wright led to his first attempts at fiction. Invisible Man won the National Book Award. Appointed to the Academy of American Arts and Letters in 1964, Ellison taught at several institutions, including Bard College, the University of Chicago, and New York University, where he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities. Joe Morton was born in 1947. A graduate of Hofstra University's drama program, he has an extensive list of film and television credits, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Speed, Smallville, and Eureka. He made his Broadway debut in Hair and was nominated for a Tony Award for the musical Raisin. In 2014 he received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for his work on Scandal.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kay on March 19, 2008

Full disclosure: I wrote my master's thesis on Ellison's novel because I thought the first time that I read it that it is one of the most significant pieces of literature from the 20th century. Now that I teach it in my AP English class, I've reread it many times, and I'm more convinced than ever th......more

Goodreads review by emma on May 29, 2023

welcome to...INVISIBLE MAY. i've done it again. another impeccable pun combining the title of a seminal work with the month it currently is. another paragon of literature added to my currently reading. another several-week period that shall be spent reading it, one chapter at a time, daily. it's anoth......more

Goodreads review by Sean Barrs on May 05, 2020

Invisible Man is an extremely well written and intelligent novel full of passion, fire and energy: it’s such a force to be reckoned with in the literary world, and not one to be taken lightly. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see som......more

Goodreads review by Joe on June 18, 2017

Most capital-G Great books can be a grim trudge, like doing homework. Invisible Man is one of the few Great books that's also relentlessly, unapologetically entertaining, full of brawls, explosions, double-crosses, and the exuberant mad. As a meditation on race, it's as fresh as if it had been first......more


Quotes

"A book of the very first order, a superb book." —Saul Bellow


Awards

  • National Book Awards