Replies

Thanks for ping/ I will be picking up this Ellison book which I've know about but never read.

BTW... No one was PC back then and amen for that!! 1952 is time capsule material/

Invisible Man is an INCREDIBLE piece of writing. Not only is it written with incredible style, but it is one of the few (maybe the only) novel that talks about the inner workings of the Communist Party. I rank this book right up there with From Here To Eternity.

Ellison himself later hinted at the impact of all those interviews when he wrote that Invisible Man's narrator edged out another attempt at a novel, about a Tuskegee flyer. That got sidetracked by a voice that entered his head uninvited, "a blues-toned laugher-at-wounds."

I found this interesting. Sometimes when you're struggling to write a story and then get that voice in your head, you gotta go with the flow. The entire book was written from that perspective of the Invisible Man narrator. BTW, I'm surprised there hasn't been a movie made based on this book. Most likely Hollywood can't deal with the scathing (but funny) material in the book about the Communist Party of the 1930s.