He was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and the Southwest. For this United States senator, once known as Bliss, was raised by Reverend Hickman in a religion and music steeped black community not unlike Ralph Ellison’s own childhood home. Out of their conversation, and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne in silence for many long years, a story emerges. The Reverend is summoned the two are left alone. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a race baiting senator from a New England state, is mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June, so they called it Juneteenth… Juneteenth, the Senator said, closing his eyes, his bandaged head resting beneath his hands.

Invisible Man is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the Negro’s anomalous position in American society. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity of the blindness of others. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience of the hero’s high school days, moves quickly to the campus of a Southern Negro college and then to New York’s Harlem, where most of the action takes place. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. Ralph Elllison’s Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life.

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