Who wrote Invisible Man (1952)?

Ralph Ellison - and it is not the H.G. Wells novel, which is The Invisible Man with the article. Ellison's narrator is unnamed and invisible in the social sense: people refuse to see him, and the book opens with him living in a disused cellar he has wired with 1,369 light bulbs stolen from the power company.

It won the National Book Award and Ellison then spent forty years failing to finish a second novel. He wrote continuously, produced a manuscript running to thousands of pages, lost a portion in a house fire in 1967, and died in 1994 with it incomplete; an edited version was published posthumously. It is one of literature's more painful cases of a first book being too large to follow.

The novel also refuses the political positions available to it. The narrator passes through a Black nationalist movement and a thinly disguised Communist Party and finds both willing to use him as a symbol while ignoring him as a person - which made Ellison unpopular with several constituencies who wanted a more usable book. His argument was that the American promise was worth holding to account rather than abandoning, and he took a good deal of criticism for it from younger writers in the 1960s.