Ten Books Everyone Should Read

This novel is important because it engages with questions of race but does not treat being black like a condition to be endured or a problem to be overcome.

Without hesitation, I would elect Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison as a mandatory book on any university reading list, if only because I’ve been telling people for years (students, friends, strangers) that everyone should read it, and if they can’t read, they should have someone read it to them (this latter option might be tricky since the novel is a shade under 600 pages long). Invisible Man is the story of an African American college student who eventually finds out the conditions under which he was expelled from his school and learns what everyone else but him seems to have been born knowing: “I am nobody but myself.”

Every reader has a book that changed her or his life. Invisible Man is mine. The novel was brought to my attention at a time when one could complete two university degrees in English literature (as I had by that time) and never even hear about the winner of the inaugural National Book Award in 1953. What makes this novel so important is that it engages with questions of race, but does not treat being black like a condition to be endured, or a problem to be overcome. Ellison’s novel, then, followed the commercial and critical success of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son, but put African American literature on the map in a way completely different from Wright’s. Ellison’s novel is narrated in the first person by someone whose name we never learn. As opposed to Wright’s novel, which is told in the third person about Bigger Thomas, Ellison’s novel is told by his central figure about himself. This difference in narrative style creates for Ellison’s narrator a sense of autonomy that Wright’s never has.

Invisible Man made it clear to me that one’s sense of identity and of esthetics need not be predetermined by one’s race. We are partly our external identity, no doubt, but we are not just that. Until I read Invisible Man for the first time – at about the age of 24 – much of my reading for school implicitly told me that people who looked like me either did not exist in literature at all, or existed only to be talked about by white characters. Invisible Man felt like it had been written to me.

But Invisible Man is not only about being black. I have been amazed over the many classes in which I have taught the book by how much my students (not predominantly black, by any means) get out of it. Many have told me that they get a sense of the problems attendant on being African American in the middle of the 20th century, to be sure, but also that the book makes them think about the development of their own individuality in ways that might not otherwise have been available to them.

This is a genuine accomplishment. I have told more than one class that Invisible Man is the greatest book the English language has produced. I still feel that way.