The Return of the Invisible Man

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

“I am an invisible man . . . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

These opening sentences of Ralph Ellison's powerful and award-winning novel, Invisible Man, echo the words of the tortured heroes of Melville's Moby-Dick (Ishmael) and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground (the nameless underground man). In the novel’s opening paragraph, Ellison captures at once the despair of being a faceless black man in America in the mid-twentieth century as well as the gut-wrenching angst of creating an individual human identity in a society marred by wars and debates raging about the values of totalitarian political systems such as Fascism and Communism. Even more than this, though, the nameless, faceless hero of Ellison's novel reflects Ellison's own battle royale (the title of the novel's opening chapter), especially as he grappled to equal the literary success that Invisible Man brought him.

Surely, Ellison's inability to complete a second novel remains one of the most enigmatic literary tales of our time (next to Harper Lee’s failure to follow up to To Kill a Mockingbird). Was Ellison a tortured genius who simply couldn't get the voices in his head to emerge from his pen onto paper? Was he, like Katherine Anne Porter, such a social dervish that he stole moments from his writing time and filled them with conversations with his friends? Was he so paralyzed by the success of his first novel that he believed no effort of his could ever measure up? Were his plans for a second novel so ambitious that he could never humanly fulfill them?

While we can never really know the exact reasons Ellison never completed a second novel—Juneteenth was published posthumously—Arnold Rampersad's exhaustive, and exhaustively detailed, biography, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Knopf; $35) by Arnold Rampersad provides a powerful measure of the man. Rampersad, the author of a majestic two-volume biography of Langston Hughes, is just the right guide to lead us into the dusty corners of Ellison's life and world. Drawing on his unprecedented full access to all of Ellison's papers, Rampersad offers us a brilliant portrait of the artist as a man trying to escape the roots of poverty in Oklahoma in order to reinvent himself as an urbane writer in the mold of Hemingway or Melville.

In his youth, Ellison turned to music as his creative outlet; his love of jazz would later animate his friendship with fellow Tuskegee student Albert Murray as well as many of the essays in his own collection, Shadow and Act. “By the spring of 1935 [when he was 22], as a model student, he played various cornet solos and led the brass quartet.” His ability to excel in music gave him tremendous confidence, and he developed strengths in other areas. One of his writing instructors, while pointing out Ellison’s poor grammar, nevertheless told him, “I’m convinced you can write.”

At Tuskegeee, Ellison befriended the college librarian, Walter Bowie Williams, and English professor, Morteza Drexel Sprague, each of whom opened new windows into the worlds of English and American literature. “Three novels above all gripped Ralph: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Each has at its center a misunderstood young man, ambitious, tormented, transgressive; each thus held up a mirror to his nature.”

Soon after he left Tuskegee, Ellison began writing short stories—modeled on the realistic prose of Richard Wright—and some reviews. For ten years, he struggled with the idea for a novel: “the invisible man is unseen and ignored, yet he is a human fact and he creates conflicts which are always detected too late.” Between 1945 and 1948, Ellison “had dedicated himself to creating a novel so rich in its symbolic, allegorical, psychological, social, and historical insight that it would be acclaimed as a masterpiece.”

When Invisible Man appeared in 1951, critics called it an “immensely moving novel” and declared that “no other writer has captured so much of the confusion and agony, the hidden gloom and surface gaiety of Negro life.” In 1953, the novel won the National Book Award, and Ellison received numerous national and international accolades.

1953 was the highlight, the miracle year—as Rampersad calls its—of Ellison's career. Over the next thirty years, Ellison increasingly had trouble mounting enough stamina and overcoming his own mental ennui to produce a second novel. One of his friends said that “in some respects the knitting together of the book was more important than actually finishing the book.” Albert Murray observed that “the trouble was that Ralph would suddenly introduce a new character with a certain purpose in mind . . . then the character would develop a mind and life of his own, and before you knew it Ralph was backing up and he had a novella going.”

In spite of his inability to complete another novel, Ellison did publish two collections of essays—Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory—to mixed critical praise, but Invisible Man remains an enduring American literary classic.

Regrettably, Ellison comes off as an arrogant, insular and mean-spirited personality in Rampersad’s biography. Although Ellison benefited from the nurture of several mentors, he himself refused to play that role with young black writers. He often alienated friends by letting his dogs run wild in their houses, refusing to clean up after them. His affair with a student during one of his stays in Europe deeply damaged his marriage. Ellison’s own insecurities made him demand much of himself and others.

Nevertheless, Rampersad's brilliant and elegant biography manages to do what the best of such studies always do; it captures Ellison’s time and place with unflinching honesty, and it makes us want to pick up Ellison’s books again to re-read them.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it