It contains sex (not much), violence (not gratuitous), a naïve narrator who takes a long time to learn life’s basic lessons, an honest and unvarnished look at racial oppression, and a cast of memorable characters. Well, why? What is it that makes a 50-year-old novel so engaging, especially one that is well over 500 pages long? There are a few superficial explanations. I’m teaching it right now in a survey of American literature after 1865, and there’s no need to give quizzes to make sure my students are keeping up with the reading. I also don’t recall a single student who wasn’t blown away by it.

I’ve taught it over the years at different institutions in different contexts, and I don’t recall encountering a single student who had read it before. I’m always surprised by how few of my students have read it, or even heard of it. Moreover, it is engaging, mysterious, funny, sad, brainy, and honest. It is a magisterial work of fiction, combining allusions to great works of literature with keen insight into the complex psychology and painful social reality of being a black man in mid-20th century America. “Invisible Man,” published in 1952, was the first novel written by an African American to win the National Book Award. Mawould have been Ralph Waldo Ellison’s 100th birthday, so I’d like to use this occasion to call attention to a novel that remains news more than a half-century after it was published. I already feel like they’re lumbering around in their late Cretaceous period.

Rather, I’m concerned that the acceleration of the availability of news and other bits of information will make novels an extinct species. My worry stems not from a sense that great novels aren’t being written anymore, for I believe they are. In my moodier moments, I worry that very few novels (the genre I study most) will be read generations hence.

(AP) This article is more than 9 years old.Įzra Pound famously defined literature as “news that stays news.” I teach contemporary literature to college students, and we often wonder which works published in our century will withstand that mysterious test of time. Author Ralph Ellison is a witness at a Senate Subcommittee hearing in Washington during continuing hearings on the racial problems in big cities, August 30, 1966.

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