American novelist, essayist, and trumpeter whose single finished novel, Invisible Man (1952), is among the most important works of 20th-century American fiction. Ellison grew up in Oklahoma, studied music at Tuskegee, moved to New York in 1936 where Richard Wright mentored him into fiction, spent the war in the merchant marine, and then spent seven years producing a book that won the 1953 National Book Award and has not gone out of print since.
Invisible Man follows an unnamed Black narrator from the Jim Crow South through a Northern city, a Harlem political movement clearly modeled on the Communist Party, and eventually to an underground retreat lit by 1,369 light bulbs stolen from the power company. Its central metaphor — invisibility as the condition of Black existence in a white-run America that refuses to see what it is looking at — gave a generation its vocabulary for describing a condition that every previous vocabulary had made unspeakable. The novel's surface is surreal and comic; its structure borrows from T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, William Faulkner's Southern modernism, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and the blues tradition, fused into something that is none of them.
Ellison's essays — Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) — argue sustained cases for the centrality of Black experience to American culture and for the dignity of vernacular traditions (jazz, folklore, Southern speech) as sources of literary art. He spent the last four decades of his life on a second novel that would not come together; portions were published posthumously as Juneteenth (1999). His most famous quarrel was with Baldwin and Irving Howe, who he felt read Black American life too thinly through the lens of protest and victimhood.