[An American novelist, essayist, short story writer, and scriptwriter, Johnson is best known for his novel Middle Passage (1990), which earned him a National Book Award. In the essay below, he offers high praise for Ellison and his writings.]

"What on earth was hiding behind the face of things?" the Everyman narrator of Invisible Man asks himself in Ralph Ellison's perennial masterpiece. His unique dilemma, and ours, is the formidable task of freeing himself from the blinding social illusions that render races and individuals invisible to each other. Only after a harrowing, roller coaster ride of betrayals and revelations above and below America's 20th century intellectual landscape does he achieve the liberating discovery that, for all the ideologies we impose upon experience, we cannot escape the chaos, the mysterious, untamed life that churns beneath official history, the "seen," and ensures the triumph of the imagination.

By any measure, Invisible Man—the one great work of Ellison, who died Saturday [16 April 1994] at age 80—is the most complex, multilayered and challenging novel about race and being and the preservation of democratic ideals in American literature. Fellow writers read Ellison with awe and gratitude. Some, of course, read him with jealousy, because everything one could want in a novel is here: humor, suspense, black history (that is, American history) from which Ellison's inexhaustible imagination teases forth truth from beneath mere facts, fuguelike prose, meditations on the nature of perception, and a rogues' gallery of characters so essentially drawn that in their naked humanity we can recognize their spirits in our contemporaries 42 years after the book's publication.

Added to that, and perhaps most impressive of all, Ellison's expansive rite-of-passage is the very idea of artistic generosity. Its exuberant, Hegelian movements gracefully blend diverse literary genres and traditions, from Mark Twain to William Faulkner, from the slave narrative to the surrealistic Kafkaesque parable, from black folklore to Freud, forever forcing us to see in the novel's technique the spirit of democracy. Spanning South and North, it traces the comic progress of a nameless black student from a state college aswim in the contradictions of Booker T. Washington's reliance on white philanthropy, to New York, where Marxists and black nationalists are engaged in a Harlem turf war.

And, as if this were not enough, Ellison gave our age a new metaphor for social alienation. His definition of "invisibility" is so common now, so much a part of the culture and language—like a coin handled by billions—that it is auto-matically invoked when we talk about the situation of American blacks, and for any social group we willingly refuse to see.

In the late 1960s when I was a college student and came of age in an anti-intellectual climate thick with separatist arguments for the necessity of a "black aesthetic," when both Ellison and poet Robert Hayden were snubbed by those under the spell of black cultural nationalism, and when so many black critics denied the idea of "universality" in literature and life, I stumbled upon Invisible Man and spent three memorable nights not so much reading as dreaming, absorbing and being altered by his remarkable adventure of ideas and artistic possibility, though I knew—at age 20—I was missing far more than I grasped.

But each time I returned to Ellison's book, teaching the novel many times over 25 years, I found new imaginative and intellectual portals to enter, more layers of meaning to peel away. Of the thousands of American novels I have read, his has been the most reliable guide for giving a young writer full access to his ethnicity and his Yankeeness. The social and spiritual dangers depicted in Invisible Man, the various forms of self-inflicted "blindness" and the intricacies of racial collision are so exhaustively treated in this single, metamorphic machine of a book that every 10 years or so we are obliged to check our cultural progress and failures against its admonitions.

Despite his groundbreaking achievements, the awards with which he was showered when Invisible Man was published, and the direction his work gave to a generation of black writers who came of age in the 1960s, Ellison's novel has often presented too severe an intellectual and moral challenge for readers reluctant to abandon simplistic formulas about race in America.

Indeed, his book once inspired rage. In his 1952 review, writer John Oliver Killens said, "The Negro people need Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man like we need a hole in the head or a stab in the back…. It is a vicious distortion of Negro life." Equally critical was Amiri Baraka, who dismissed Ellison as a middle-class Negro for his insistence that mastery of literary craft must take priority over politics in a writer's apprenticeship. For Ellison that apprenticeship included T. S. Eliot as well as Langston Hughes, Pound and Hemingway, alongside Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein and Dostoevsky together with the blues.

Fortunately, Invisible Man also can be enjoyed on the level of rousing entertainment, as a thrilling odyssey that follows a naive but ambitious young man through an entire universe of unforgettable characters and events. There is Mr. Norton, one of the white founders of a black college—"a trustee of consciousness"—who believes Negroes are his "fate" and discovers his deepest fears and desires mirrored back at him by Jim Trueblood, a black share-cropper who has committed incest.

No less startling is Dr. Bledsoe, the minister administrator of a school that features a "bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hand, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I stand puzzled," says Ellison's protagonist, "unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding."

On and on they come; mythic characters spun from the social paradoxes of the uniquely American belief in (and failure to achieve) equality—Lucius Brockay, the black laborer installed in the bowels of Liberty Paints, the "machine within the machine"; Brother Jack, leader of an organization dedicated to "working for a better world for all people," but racist to its core and eager to eliminate people "like dead limbs that must be pruned away" if they fail to serve the group's purpose; and Ras the Exhorter, a Harlem demagogue encapsulating in one powerful figure Afrocentric thought from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to, even today, Leonard Jeffries ("You think I'm crazy, it is c'ase I speak bahd English? Hell, it ain't my mama tongue, mahn. I'm African")—all of them blind, Ellison says, to his protagonist's humanity, his individuality, and the synthetic, creolizing process long at work in this country, making each and every one of us, whether we like it or not, a cultural mongrel.

That underlying experience, which so many in the universe of Invisible Man fail to see, is delivered by Ellison in several astonishing scenes most novelists would give their first-born children to have created. One is the cryptic paint factory episode, where "Optic White" is mixed with 10 drops of black "dope," which is expected to disappear into the "purest white that can be found," but instead reveals a "gray tinge"—a blending of the two into one that changes the identity of both.

Another is the Harlem eviction scene in which the possessions of an old black couple thrown onto the street become a doorway for experiencing black history from the Civil War forward. A third, the most striking episode of all, is the Rinehart section, at once hilarious and profound as it dramatizes the polymorphous character of human seeing, the fluidity of the self, and portrays "history" as a mental construct beyond which lies "a world … without boundaries."

As might be expected, appreciating the achievement of Ellison's fiction inevitably means taking seriously both the singular aesthetic position that makes it possible and his notion of the Negro's crucial role in this country's evolution—an understanding shared by most of our elders born early in the century.

Read his 1981 introduction to Invisible Man. There, Ellison confronts, then triumphantly solves a problem that had long haunted the fiction of a young nation known for the strong, anti-intellectual strains in its culture. It is "the question of why most protagonists of Afro-American fiction (not to mention the black characters in fiction by whites) were without intellectual depth. Too often they were figures caught up in the most intense forms of social struggle, subject to the most extreme forms of the human predicament but yet seldom able to articulate the issues which tortured them…."

However, his happy (for us) discovery, one that everyone concerned about "multi-culturalism" would do well to memorize, was that, "by a trick of fate (and our racial problems notwithstanding), the human imagination is integrative—and the same is true of the centrifugal force that inspirits the democratic process." (Italics mine.)

Such an insight enabled him to envision and execute the visionary work that had been part of our literary canon for 40 years. In theorizing about it, he said, "I would have to provide him [Invisible Man] with something of a world-view, give him a consciousness in which serious philosophical questions could be raised, provide him with a range of diction that could play upon the richness of our readily shared vernacular speech and of American types as they operated on various levels of society."

Hoping to create "a fiction which, leaving sociology to the scientists, arrived at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of a fairy tale," Ellison devoted five years to the novel's execution. His theory led him into lasting insights, edging him toward a way to sing the unseen so often in the novel that even his casual asides cannot be ignored, as when Invisible Man thinks of his literature class, where he studied James Joyce, and his teacher observes:

Stephen's problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record…. We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!

Because no author could hope for more than to work in this wonderful, Ellisonesque spirit of inclusion, I dedicated my acceptance speech for the National Book Award in fiction to Ralph Ellison when my third novel, Middle Passage, won this prize in 1990. It seemed to me the very least I could do in the presence of an elder who forged a place in American culture for the possibility of the fiction I dreamed of writing. For a man who, when the global list of the most valuable authors of the 20th century is finally composed, will be among those at the pinnacle.