There is minor wear and tear and slight discoloration for a vintage book from 1952 it holds up well. Invisible Man, novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. It was Ellison’s only novel to be published during his lifetime. Invisible Man is widely acknowledged as one of the great novels of American literature and a landmark in African American literature, winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, the first novel by a Black author to receive that honour. The narrator of Invisible Man is a nameless young Black man who moves in a 20th-century United States where reality is surreal and who can survive only through pretense. Because the people he encounters “see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination,” he is effectively invisible.