YMCA, and later as a clerk for a psychiatrist and a laboratory assistant at a paint company. At the YMCA, he met Langston Hughes, the generous poet who encouraged him to write. Both Hughes and Richard Wright, to whom Hughes introduced Ellison, were members of the Communist Party and wrote for socialist publications. Although Ellison was never a party member, he was initially in sympathy with socialist politics.

Ellison went to Ohio in 1937 after the death of his mother and was reunited with his younger brother Herbert. They spent several homeless months subsisting on their hunting skills. This hand-to-mouth existence, coupled with the discovery that an incompetent black doctor had caused his mother’s death, reinforced his anger and cynicism. He returned to New York City, having begun to try his hand at writing fiction.

Sponsored by Wright, Ellison joined the New York Writers’ Project, a program of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA). Here he researched African American history, material that would energize his novel. He disciplined himself to read extensively among classical novelists like Fyodor Dostoevski, as well as the modernists Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. The writings of French existentialist André Malraux inspired Ellison’s search for an intellectual understanding of the relationship of the “Negro” (the term in common use at that time, and one he favored throughout his life) to the white American society. He supported himself by writing essays and book reviews for socialist publications and edited the short-lived Negro Quarterly. He served briefly as a cook in the merchant marine during World War II and married Rose Poindexter, a union that ended in 1945 after his affair with a white woman.

Rampersad traces in detail the genesis of the text of Invisible Man. Ellison was unsettled by Richard Wright’s nonfiction book Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) and his novella “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942). Under the influence of literary critics Stanley Edgar Hyman and Kenneth Burke, he was abandoning his communist leanings to explore modernist theories of mythology and symbolism. Two short stories, “Flying Home” (1943) and “King of the Bingo Game” (1944), attracted favorable critical attention.

In 1945, during a vacation in Vermont with Fanny McConnell Buford, who would become his second wife, he typed the words “I am an invisible man”and his imagination took flight. He envisioned an epic masterpiece that would trace the history of the Negro in America. The invisible man of the title would, in Ellison’s words, “move upward through Negro life, coming into contact with its various forms and personality types, will operate in the Negro middle class, in the left-wing movement and descend again into the disorganized atmosphere of the Harlem underworld.” After years of struggle with the manuscript, Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952.

Crucial to the success of the novel, Rampersad believes, were Ellison’s choice of the first-person narration and the surrealistic expression of chaos, as the black man tried to construct the meaning of his existence in an alien white society. His technique was experimental, juxtaposing comedy and tragedy, describing the wildly fantastic journey of the young protagonist toward self-fulfillment. Although certain plot incidents were based loosely on his experiences, the novel was not autobiographical. However, Rampersad interprets the isolation of the narrator in the epilogue as a sign of Ellison’s increasing distance from the realities of the world of ordinary black people.

Invisible Man created an immediate sensation in the predominantly white literary world. Black critics, however, called it a betrayal of the race. Ellison’s response was that his critics had neither the intelligence nor the sensitivity to understand his achievement. In 1953, Invisible Man won the National Book Award, winning over Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. In his acceptance speech, Ellison said: “The chief significance of Invisible Man” is “its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.”

His success gave him entry into the white literary establishment and the homes of wealthy socialites, where he and Fanny, now married and greatly enjoying their celebrity, were usually the only black people present. He won a two-year fellowship to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome. Back in America, Ellison formed friendships with noted writers, among them Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren, and John Cheever. However, in securing his place in the white world, Ellison was separating himself from African American culture, the roots of his creativity. Younger black writers looking to him for encouragement were ignored, even insulted. As he garnered honors and prestigious appointments with organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, Ellison worked on his second novel. He accepted a series of university lecturing duties that allowed time for his creative work.

Despite his success, beneath Ellison’s charming public persona lurked a different figure. He had frequent angry outbursts and drank heavily, becoming quarrelsome. He excused his affair with a white woman by blaming Fanny for their childlessness. It was rumored that he carried a knife and was dangerous. Invited to join exclusive organizations like the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the New York Century Club, he voted to keep out women and other African Americans.

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, Ellison believed that as an artist he had no obligation to take an active role beyond some financial support for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He continued to ignore, and often insult, younger black writers, including James Baldwin. He publicly dismissed as inferior the work of Black Power activists such as Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka. Still, he was deeply hurt when students called him an “Uncle Tom.” He began declining speaking engagements and academic appointments, claiming that he needed time for his second novel.

In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays that Rampersad ranks among the best African American writing about race. His many honors included two Presidential Medals of Arts awarded by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan. As African American literature gained acceptance in the academy, Invisible Man became an influential text. A second collection of essays, Going to the Territory, was published in 1986.

Ellison continued to gather honors and was in demand as a speaker for the rest of his life, but he never published a second novel. He died on April 16, 1994. The sprawling collection of episodes he had struggled for years to complete was edited and published as Juneteenth five years after his death.

Rampersad remains impartial in presenting this nearly overwhelming body of material. Invisible Man and the two collections of essays are, in his view, a monumental achievement. Ellison himself he describes as a liberal humanist, a lifelong believer in the possibilities of the American Dream and the conviction that the lives of black and white Americans must be inseparable. However, in cultivating his white relationships, he distanced himself from his roots in the African American culture whose strength and resiliency he revered.

The evidence preserved by Ellison and his wife Fanny reveals a troubled personality with a record of nasty, unpredictable, often cruel behavior. However, was he unfairly criticized for his failure to publish the long-awaited second novel? Perhaps. As this biography portrays him, Ellison was a perfectionist who had set his sights so high that to surpass the achievement of Invisible Man would have been impossible.

Rampersad concludes that, whatever Ellison’s personal flaws, his many admirers believe that “no one who had written Invisible Man and so skillfully explicated the matter of race and American culture in his essays could ever be accounted a failure.”