Soon after his move to New York in 1936, his book reviews, short stories, and articles began to appear in numerous magazines and anthologies, and Ellison was on his way to becoming an acclaimed author.
Early Success with Invisible Man
In the early 1940s, Ellison started out writing a novel about a captured American pilot in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. But during the summer of 1945, visiting friends in Vermont while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine, the opening lines of Invisible Man came to him, prompting him to write an entirely different novel.
Ellison described Invisible Man, published in 1952, as "a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality." Ellison claimed that his novel comprised "a series of reversals," providing a "portrait of the artist as rabble-rouser." Responding to questions concerning the narrator's journey as a reflection of the black struggle for justice and equality, Ellison contended that he is "not concerned with injustice, but with art," pointing out that there is "no dichotomy between art and protest". To illustrate, he cited works such as Cervantes' Don Quixote and Dostoyevski's Notes from Underground, arguing that these literary works not only embody protest against social and political constraints, but ultimately protest against the limitations of human life itself.
Ellison became known primarily for Invisible Man, which won the Russwurm Award and the National Book Award and established him as one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century. But he also published several nonfiction works and short stories.
