When this novel was first published in 1952, it wrenched thousands of readers into a sudden recognition of what it was like to be black in a country where black people were invisible. Today Invisible Man remains just as powerful – not because its truths are wholly new, but because it delivers them with a visceral immediacy that is at once painful, frightening and exhilarating. Invisible Man is the story of several passages in a young man’s life – from the deep South to the streets of Harlem, from living on his knees to standing defiantly on his feet, from a fearful denial to a passionate embrace of his own Americanness. It is a Dantesque journey through the subterranean strata of black society in the era between the wars, related in a voice that prays and incites, singes the blues and plays the dozens.