Ellison says in his introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition that he started to write what would eventually become Invisible Man in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont (actually in the neighboring town of Fayston[7]), in the summer of 1945 while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine.[8] The book took five years to complete with one year off for what Ellison termed an "ill-conceived short novel".[9] Invisible Man was published as a whole in 1952. Ellison had published a section of the book in 1947, 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.
In his speech accepting the 1953 National Book Award, Ellison said that he considered the novel's chief significance to be its "experimental attitude".[10] Before Invisible Man, many (if not most) novels dealing with African Americans were written solely for social protest, notably, Native Son and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The narrator in Invisible Man says, "I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either", signaling a break from the usual protest novel. In the essay "The World and the Jug", a response to Irving Howe's essay "Black Boys and Native Sons" which "pit[s] Ellison and [James] Baldwin against [Richard] Wright and then", as Ellison would say, "gives Wright the better argument", Ellison makes a fuller statement about the position he held about his book in the larger canon of work by an American who happens to be of African ancestry. In the opening paragraph to that essay Ellison poses three questions: "Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that Sociology-oriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project? Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?"
Placing Invisible Man within the canon of either the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement is difficult. It owes allegiance to both and neither. Ellison's resistance to being pigeonholed by his peers bubbled over into his statement to Irving Howe about what he deemed to be a relative vs. an ancestor. He says to Howe "...perhaps you will understand when I say that he [Wright] did not influence me if I point out that while one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as an artist, choose one's 'ancestors'. Wright was, in this sense, a 'relative'; Hemingway an 'ancestor'." It was this idea of "playing the field", so to speak, not being "all-in", that led to some of Ellison's more staunch critics. Howe, in "Black Boys and Native Sons", but also other black writers such as John Oliver Killens, who once denounced Invisible Man by saying: "The Negro people need Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man like we need a hole in the head or a stab in the back. ... It is a vicious distortion of Negro life."
Ralph Ellison in 1961Ellison's "ancestors" included, among others, T. S. Eliot. In an interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Ellison states that what he had learned from his The Waste Land was imagery and also improvisation techniques he had only before seen in jazz.[11] Some other influences include William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Ellison once called Faulkner the South's greatest artist, and in the Spring 1955 Paris Review, Ellison said of Hemingway: "I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story. I guess many young writers were doing this, but I also used his description of hunting when I went into the fields the next day. I had been hunting since I was eleven, but no one had broken down the process of wing-shooting for me, and it was from reading Hemingway that I learned to lead a bird. When he describes something in print, believe him; believe him even when he describes the process of art in terms of baseball or boxing; he’s been there."[9]
Some of Ellison's influences had a more direct impact on his novel. The first line of Invisible Man ("I am an invisible man") for example, is a conscious echo of Notes from Underground ("I am a sick man").[12] Ellison acknowledged this borrowing in his 1981 introduction to his novel saying the novel's main character can be "associated, ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground".[13]
Arnold Rampersad, Ellison's biographer, says that Herman Melville had a profound influence on Ellison's way of writing about race: the narrator "resembles no one else in previous fiction so much as he resembles Ishmael of Moby-Dick". Ellison signals his debt in the prologue to the novel, where the narrator remembers a moment of truth under the influence of marijuana and evokes a church service: "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the 'Blackness of Blackness'. And the congregation answers: 'That blackness is most black, brother, most black...'" In this scene Ellison "reprises a moment in the second chapter of Moby-Dick", where Ishmael wanders around New Bedford looking for a place to spend the night and enters a black church: "It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there." According to Rampersad, it was Melville who "empowered Ellison to insist on a place in the American literary tradition" by his example of "representing the complexity of race and racism so acutely and generously" in Moby-Dick.
