I finished my 82nd book, Invisible Man, in January. Ralph Ellison’s 1952 work is a novel of racial tension in Interwar America; not an uncommon theme on this list, and one I was expecting to be similar (which isn’t a bad thing), to Native Son.
Invisible Man is the story of an unnamed narrator’s journey from the South in an unspecified time, to New York, where he works for social justice and racial equality. Starting as a gifted but underprivileged orator, he is able to obtain a scholarship through a humiliating “battle royale,” where he defeats other young, blindfolded, black men, fighting for a sac of fake gold pieces.
