This content is from Wikipedia. We do not consider this content professional or citable. Please use your discretion when relying on it. GradeSaver also offers a professionally written study guide by one of our staff editors.

Historical background

In his introduction to 30th Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man,^[2] Ellison says that he started writing the book in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont in the Summer of 1945 where he was on sick leave from the Merchant Marines and that the novel continued to preoccupy him in various parts of New York City. In an interview in the The Paris Review in 1955,^[3] Ellison states that the book took five years to complete with one year out for what he termed as an "ill-conceived short novel." Invisible Man was published as a whole in 1952; however, copyright dates show the initial publication date as 1947, 1948, indicating that Ellison had published a section of the book prior to full publication. That section was the famous "Battle Royal" scene, which had been shown to Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon magazine by Frank Taylor, one of Ellison's early supporters.

Ellison states in his National Book Award acceptance speech that he considered the novel's chief significance to be its experimental attitude. Rejecting the idea of social protest -- as Ellison would later put it -- he did not want to write another protest novel, and also seeing the highly-regarded styles of Naturalism and Realism too limiting to speak to the broader issues of race and America, Ellison created an open style, one that did not restrict his ideas to a movement but was more free flowing in its delivery. What Ellison finally settled on was a style based heavily upon modern symbolism. It was the kind of symbolism which Ellison first encountered in the poem The Waste Land. ^[4], by T. S. Eliot. Ellison had read this poem as a freshman at the Tuskegee Institute and was immediately impressed by The Waste Land's ability to merge his two greatest passions, that of music and of literature, for it was in The Waste Land that he first saw jazz set to words. When asked later about what he had learned from the poem, Ellison responded: imagery, and also improvisation —techniques he had only before seen in jazz.

Ellison always believed that he would be a musician first and a writer second, and yet even so he had acknowledged that writing provided him a "growing satisfaction." It was a "covert process," according to Ellison: "a refusal of his right hand to let his left hand know what it was doing."^[5]