Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison · first published 1952
45% recommend55% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Ellison's novel is praised for vivid, lyrical prose and visually striking scenes, exploring race, identity, and power in America; recommended to readers wanting serious literary fiction with lasting social insight.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Invisible Man is the story of a young black man from the South who does not fully understand racism in the world. Filled with hope about his future, he goes to college, but gets expelled for showing one of the white benefactors the real and seamy side of black existence. He moves to Harlem and becomes an orator for the Communist party, known as the Brotherhood. In his position, he is both threatened and praised, swept up in a world he does not fully understand. As he works for the organization, he encounters many people and situations that slowly force him to face the truth about racism and hi
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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut 1984 by George Orwell To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Midnight’s…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013” ↗also a lot of the riotets are young, upper middle class, white males what says black lives matter better than trashing their neighborhoods? read ellison's invisible man written in 1950s to see how long white people have been exploiting African Americans in this way!
on “Gallup: 81% of Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence” ↗…favorite fiction books and short story collections in no particular order: 1) Collected Fictions by Borges 2) The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka 3) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 4) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 5) 9 Stories by J.D. Salinger 6) 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme 7) 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 8) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
on “Ask HN: What are some must read books?” ↗Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Read it in my first semester as a freshman Biochem major in college with a great grad student as the teacher of a class on American Lit. Really changed how I thought about books and…
on “Ask HN: Are there any books that changed your life during college or school?” ↗…been employed in healthcare and software development in the intervening two decades. I can't speak to the relevance of any specific work of fiction to any HN'er but the one writing this comment, but "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison and "Tender is the Night" by F. Scott Fitzgerald are two novels that stand out to me as being particularly good.
on “Ask HN: Interesting (Non software) books?” ↗…Newer Stuff: Nine Stories (Salinger), The Razor's Edge (Maugham), Nausea (Sartre), Siddartha (Hesse), Road to Serfdom (Hayek), The Book (Watts), Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Atlas Shrugged (Rand), Invisible Man (Ellison), Debunking Economics (Keen), Blood Meridian (McCarthy), The Center Cannot Hold (Saks), This Time Is Different (Reinhart/Rogoff), Infinite Jest (Wallace), Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson) All of…
on “Ask HN: What books do you wish your manager would read?” ↗…which is of course his typical genre -- but his work transcends the genre and is deeply literary. Carrie should be on the bookshelf next to other somewhat recent masterpieces like the Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man (Ellison's), Lord of the Flies, the Great Gatsby, and Ulysses.
on “Reading a book a week for your career” ↗1) Chris Moriarty. Spin State - relatively-hard sci-fi with decent non sci-fi elements (i.e. characters and stuff), which I think is rare. 2) Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. I really enjoyed the writing, among other things, and how he captures short moments and scenes with sort of a hard-to-describe quality of a visual art, almost. 3) Ilya Somin. Free To Move. To me most…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023” ↗…merely my opinion and I have no problem with people disagreeing. I think the biggest impact is in how people can function in modern society - pay gap, positions of power, tokenization - a good book is "Invisible Man" by Ralph Waldo Ellison which is about more than being black in America but about being an individual that everyone wants to put in a box or a particular group - he's invisible because people don't see…
on “Ignoring Boys' Emotional Needs Fuels Public Health Risks” ↗I’ll give a few. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (and the great TA I had teaching the course) got me to change my major to English as a college freshman. I was just hit with a thought like, “I’ve never read anything like this and I’ve…
on “Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?” ↗Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume Multiple books from both the Torah, and Old and New Testaments of various versions of the Bible Gomorra by Roberto Saviano
on “Ask HN: What's a book that fundamentally altered your mental models” ↗…concept of battle royale in general was popularized with the Hunger Games and of course the film named Battle Royale. And, "battle royale" as a phrase was used by Ralph Ellison in 1952 in his classic novel Invisible Man, describing a free-for-all boxing match that the protagonist must participate in. So Brendan Greene didn't come up with this out of thin air, or at least he wasn't the first. On the other hand, I see…
on “Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018” ↗It's important to watch for careful wordings: 22% of sales, 5 million downloads. As a single data point, I've downloaded about 20 free books (I've read The Invisible Man and I'm halfway through Pinocchio). The overlap of free books on Kindle vs iBooks is pretty high (mostly all from Project Gutenberg). I think the iBooks ability to download a free sample (usually first…
on “Why Apple’s iBooks Numbers Are Meaningless” ↗…can show up in the code just because they forgot to include enough data in their training set. --- [1] In light of which Ralph Ellison's novel is particularly prescient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man
on “Be Careful What You Code For” ↗…Maeda (http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Simplicity-Design-Technology-Busi...) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- Robert M. Persig (http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry...) Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison (http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Man-Ralph-Ellison/dp/0679732...) How to Win Friends and Influence People -- Dale Carnegie (http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...)…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading right now?” ↗