Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison's National Book Award-winning novel, published in 1952, a century after another influential work of American protest fiction, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, was not intended by the author to serve an overtly political function. "I wasn't, and am not, primarily concerned with injustice, but with art," Ellison said. Nevertheless, the book has gone on to be instrumental in transforming ideas about race and identity in America.