Norton Scientific - Invisible Man | Redgage

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Norton Scientific - Invisible Man

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man

Invisible Man is a novel written by Ralph Ellison, and the only one
that he published during his lifetime (his other novels were published
posthumously). It won him the National Book Award in 1953. The novel
addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-
Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism,
the relationship between black identity andMarxism, and the reformist
racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of
individuality and personal identity. In 1998, the Modern Library
ranked Invisible Man nineteenth on its list of the 100 best English-
language novels of the 20th century.Time magazine included the novel
in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[1]
Historical background
In his introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man,
[2] Ellison says that he started writing the book in a barn in
Waitsfield, Vermont in the summer of 1945 while on sick leave from the
Merchant Marine and that the novel continued to preoccupy him in
various parts of New York City. In an interview in The Paris Review
1955,[3] Ellison states that the book took five years to complete with
one year off for what he termed an "ill-conceived short novel."
Invisible Man was published as a whole in 1952; however, copyright
dates show the initial publication date as 1947, 1948, indicating that
Ellison had published a section of the book prior to full publication.
That section was the famous "Battle Royal" scene, which had been shown
to Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon magazine by Frank Taylor, one
of Ellison's early supporters. Ellison states in his National Book
Award acceptance speech that he considered the novel's chief
significance to be its experimental attitude. Rejecting the idea of
social protest—as Ellison would later put it—he did not want to write
another protest novel, and also seeing the highly regarded styles of
Naturalism and Realism too limiting to speak to the broader issues of
race and America, Ellison created an open style, one that did not
restrict his ideas to a movement but was more free-flowing in its
delivery. What Ellison finally settled on was a style based heavily
upon modern symbolism. It was the kind of symbolism that Ellison first
encountered in the poem The Waste Land,[4] by T. S. Eliot. Ellison had
read this poem as a freshman at the Tuskegee Institute and was
immediately impressed by The Waste Land's ability to merge his two
greatest passions, that of music and literature, for it was in The
Waste Land that he first saw jazz set to words. When asked later what
he had learned from the poem, Ellison responded: imagery, and also
improvisation—techniques he had only before seen in jazz.