Invisible Man

The only novel Ralph Ellison published during his lifetime is narrated by an unnamed African-American man who calls himself invisible because people refuse to see him. The story follows him from the Deep South, where he attends a Black college and is expelled, to Harlem, where he becomes a speaker for a political organization known as the Brotherhood. Along the way Ellison takes on Black nationalism, the connection between Black identity and Marxism, the racial program of Booker T. Washington and the different forms racism takes in the North and the South. Published in 1952, it took the National Book Award a year later; no African-American writer had won it before.

Barack Obama has been linked to it through a published roundup of the books he recommended as president.