We are not given a specific year Invisible Man is set in, and the story actually spans many years, from the narrator's high school graduation through college and into his adulthood in Harlem. However, the story is written retrospectively, with the narrator looking back over the course of his life.
We can use context clues to locate a probable date span for the novel. Ellison began to write it in 1945, and published the chapter "Battle Royal" in 1947, though the novel as a whole did not appear until 1952. As Ellison moved to Harlem himself in 1936 and the novel is loosely based on his own life, we can set the time of his writing in the late 1930s, with the narrator assessing his experiences sometime before the start of World War II.
The dating is significant because the narrator comes of age in a pre–Civil Rights...
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era of virulent racism. Much of the racism that is more covert today was openly expressed in the 1920s and 1930s. Without many role models of positive Black male identity in his period, it was easy for the narrator to feel invisible or despised, never valued for who he was as an individual by the wider white world.
When was Invisible Man published?
Ralph Ellison began writing his novel Invisible Man in the summer of 1945, during the time that he was on sick leave from the United States Merchant Marine in which he had been serving in World War II.
Part of the unfinished book, known as the "Battle Royal" section of chapter 1—in which a blindfolded group of young Black men wearing boxing gloves are ordered by rich white men to beat each other up while a naked blonde woman with an American flag painted on her stomach parades around the room—was published in Horizon magazine in 1947. The entire chapter 1 of the book was published in Magazine of the Year in 1948.
The completed novel was published in 1952. Invisible Man won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953.
Ellison also wrote two books of essays: Shadow Act, published in 1964, and Going to the Territory, published in 1986. At the time of his death in 1994, Ellison had written over 2,000 pages of another novel on which he had been working in the forty years since he wrote Invisible Man. A 368-page condensed version of the novel was published as Juneteenth in 1996, and a lengthier version of 1100 pages, entitled Three Days Before the Shooting..., was published in 2010.
When was Invisible Man written?
Ralph Ellison began writing Invisible Man in the mid-1940s, although the story takes place earlier in the twentieth century. The book took several years to complete. Specifically, according to the New York Times, the book was written “over a seven-year period” and published in 1952 by Random House. Once it was out, and it reached and stayed on the list of bestselling titles for sixteen weeks. One year after its publication, the book earned the US National Book Award for Fiction.
In describing Invisible Man, the National Book Foundation calls it
a milestone in American literature...[that] established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.
The author attributed T. S. Elliot and his poem “The Waste Land” as a major influence.
Like Ellison at the time that he wrote Invisible Man, the protagonist is a young Black man who is unnamed in the book. After coming of age in the American south and going to a segregated college (Ellison himself attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama), he moves to New York, just as the author did.
In New York, Ralph Ellison became involved with other young Black writers who would eventually become well-known authors, including Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. Ellison also got involved with the Federal Writers' Project, which was a New Deal jobs program that was part of the US Works Projects Administration (WPA). Although Invisible Man post-dates the Federal Writers' Project, which lasted from 1936 to 1940, other works by Ellison are included in its archives.
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