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Primary source: Book review by Irving Howe of Invisible Man (1952).
Caption: New York intellectual Irving Howe affirms Ralph Ellison's book Invisible Man as a "Negro novel."
. . . No other writer [Ralph Ellison] has captured so much of the confusion and agony, the hidden gloom and surface gaiety of Negro life. His ear for Negro speech is magnificent: a share–cropper calmly describing how he seduced his own daughter, a Harlem street–vender spinning jive, a West Indian woman inciting her men to resist an eviction. The rhythm of the prose [in Invisible Man] is harsh and tensed, like a beat of harried alertness. The observation is expert: Ellison knows exactly how zoot–suiters walk, making stylization their principle of life, and exactly how the antagonism between American and West Indian Negroes works itself out in speech and humor. For all his self–involvement, he is capable of extending himself toward his people, of accepting them as they are, in their blindness and hope. And in his final scene he has created an unforgettable image: "Ras the Destroyer," a Negro nationalist, appears on a horse, dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain, carrying spear and shield, and charging wildly into the police—a black Quixote, mad, absurd, yet unbearably pathetic.
Some reviewers, from the best of intentions, have assured their readers that this is a good novel and not merely a good Negro novel. But of course Invisible Man is a Negro novel—what white man could ever have written it? It is drenched in Negro life, talk, music: it tells us how distant even the best of the whites are from the black men that pass them on the streets; and it is written from a particular compound of emotions that no white man could possibly simulate. To deny that this is a Negro novel is to deprive the Negroes of their one basic right: the right to cry out their difference.
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Irving Howe, review of Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, The Nation 174, no. 19 (10 May 1952): 454.
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.
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