Ellison, Ralph Waldo

US novelist. His Invisible Man (1952) portrays with humour and energy the plight of a black man whom post-war US society cannot acknowledge. It is regarded as one of the most impressive novels published in the USA in the 1950s. He also wrote essays collected in Shadow and Act (1964).

Ellison saw black people not as separate or marginalized but right in the centre of US national life. He identified ‘being invisible’ as a complex condition, applying to himself ‘simply because people refuse to see me’, but emphasizing that part of the problem was that the invisible man was also invisible to himself. The success of his work encouraged the development of black literature in the 1950s and 1960s.