Ralph Ellison wrote fiction and essays about race, identity and the difficulty of being seen accurately within American society. Invisible Man follows an unnamed Black narrator from the South through college, work and political activism in Harlem, repeatedly encountering institutions that try to define him for their own purposes. The novel combines realism, satire, speeches and surreal episodes rather than following a single conventional style. Ellison's essay collections, including Shadow and Act, address literature, music, race and American culture more directly. His prose is dense, rhetorical and symbolically layered, fitting African American literature, modernist fiction and political or cultural essays about identity and social power. Read more Less
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