I first got to know Ralph Ellison back in the early 1960s, when he and Fanny often came up to Connecticut for weekend visits. We had wonderful, rather liquid evenings. Our Virginia and Alabama by way of Oklahoma origins gave us a common ground of interest, and we talked about Southern matters—such things as bird dogs and cars and whiskey and the native cuisine. This is not to say that we shied away from intellectual or social concerns, far from it, but though the civil rights movement was on the horizon we rarely spoke of race and the racial conflict. Neither, for some reason, did we dwell much on literary things. A mutual reticence, I suppose, kept us from talking about our own novels. Which, as I reflect on it, was a great pity, for I really yearned to have the courage to tell him how passionately I admired Invisible Man.
Recently I received a set of the volumes in the new and beautiful Modern Library. I was especially pleased to see that Invisible Man was one of the few novels by a contemporary writer included in this collection. Invisible Man surely deserves its place among the modern classics. It appeared in 1952, a year after my own first novel was published, and I recall that when I first read it I had none of the envy first novelists have for each other, because I realized I was in the presence of one of those amazing books that one can call transforming. A transforming work is one that breaks all the rules and causes you to rearrange your understanding of the world so radically that an important part of you, at least—your conscience or your sensibility, probably both—is never really the same again. Invisible Man is, of course, essentially about the anguish of being black in America, but countless books have been written about that experience, and while many of these have been excellent only a very few have been transforming. The difference between Invisible Man and these others, and what makes it a masterpiece, is that it is a great fable which, though it never loses the particularity of its negritude, is really about the half-madness of the human condition.
Ralph was an artist of the first rank and his artistry is the secret ingredient of the book, really, and the reason why its naked bleakness and manic glee continue so to haunt white people as well as black people and to command our respect and attention. As only a few writers have done—Gogol is one, Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn is another—Ralph, with his musician's sense of tonality, struck the perfect eternal pitch between hilarity and excruciating pain, and the reverberations have been immense and lasting. He will be with us as long as the written word has meaning.
[Sewanee Review, January–March 2009.]