8vo. Original two-toned cloth; dust jacket (minor wear to extremities); morocco-backed folding case.

FIRST EDITION OF ELLISON'S FIRST NOVEL. Ralph Ellison began work on Invisible Man while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine in 1945, with the novel taking nearly five years to complete. It won the 1953 National Book Award, and during his acceptance speech Ellison said of his book's genesis, "To see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many triumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction. I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization." President Barack Obama would later cite Invisible Man as a key source of inspiration in the writing of his first memoir, Dreams from My Father.