Ralph Ellison

This is a fascinating odyssey, the story of a young African-American man striving to find his identity and make sense of societal issues in the earlier part of the twentieth century. It is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator who undergoes quite a metamorphosis; in the beginning, he is a young, naive student in the South who takes for granted the way things are for black people, but then events force him to head north, where he has many adventures that are confusing, enlightening, enraging, and affirming. Along the way, he meets people who want to use him in one way or another, but none of these people are able to see him as the individual he is. Even when he is hired to make speeches for a social action group that he believes is doing good work, he is eventually admonished not to be thinking for himself; he is there to be black and say what the mostly white leadership of this group tells him to say. He is invisible.

Ralph Ellison won The National Book Award in 1953 for this long novel, which I have not summarized here because there is too much to tell and I would not do it justice. This one will stay with me for awhile.