Free Republic

This month's Freeper Reading Club (now over 100 members) discussion is about Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." As I stated when assigning this book, as soon as you think you know where this book is heading, it completely changes directions and surprises you. Upon re-reading "Invisible Man" it seems apparent to me that Joseph Heller, author of "Catch-22," must have read this book since much of the surreal absurdity in "Invisible Man" was reflected in his own acclaimed book years later. As we saw in "Invisible Man," nobody really saw the man (never named) as he really was. To them he...

Becoming a literary classic can spell death to one's street cred. For the last three decades of his life, Ralph Ellison spent a lot of time defending Invisible Man from a younger generation of black radicals, and defending himself for not finishing a second novel. By the 1980s, Invisible Man's subversively democratic last line—"Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"—spoke mainly to students in college classrooms. Lawrence Jackson's new biography, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius avoids academic overgrowth by focusing on Ellison's early life and work, following the author through Invisible Man's 1952 publication and...