Ellison credits T.S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land — which he describes "as intriguing as a trumpet improvisation by Louis Armstrong," for arousing his interest in literature. Trying to gain a better understanding, Ellison started reading literary criticism. He soon started searching for what he called "Eliot's kind of sensibility" in Negro poetry but didn't find it — until he came across the writings of Richard Wright.
Although he admired Wright's work, such as the novel Native Son, Ellison felt that Wright's use of the protest novel, which generally depicted blacks as the oppressed victims of whites, and his tendency to write primarily for a white audience limited his vision. Writing Invisible Man, Ellison set out to move beyond the protest novel to portray a narrator whose life was not defined strictly by his race, but by his willingness to accept personal responsibility for creating his own life.
