According to Ellison, "[One writes] out of one thing only — one's experience as understood through one's knowledge of self, culture, and literature." His dedication to this concept is evident in his writings, which focus on the struggles of black Americans striving to be accepted as simply Americans.
Renowned author and critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. once wrote that Ellison, Richard Wright (1908–60) and James Baldwin (1924–87) comprised "the holy male trinity of the black tradition." Wright, most famous for his protest novel Native Son, was known for depicting blacks as oppressed victims of white society, and Baldwin — best known for his nonfiction works such as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time — focused on religious themes and "blackness as salvation." But only Ellison, who saw blackness as a metaphor for the human condition, transcended the theme of race by incorporating mythological and supernatural elements into his works. Thus, while Invisible Man explores the narrator's attempt to cope with racism and segregation, it also explores one man's attempts to come to terms with the myth of the American Dream and to make sense of a society in which both the oppressed and the oppressor become victims of their blindness concerning American identity and the true brotherhood of humanity. Consequently, Ellison is renowned not only as an author and the master of black vernacular, but as an astute commentator on literature, culture, and race.
