Invisible Man
Franklin Center, Pennsylvania: The Franklin Library, 1980. Illustrated by Will Harmuth. Limited Signed Edition. Full Leather. Fine / No Jacket as Issued. Item #5399
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
In Fine, unread condition, handled only to confirm the author's signature and take photographs. A Franklin Library 1980 Limited Edition signed by Ralph Ellison. Illustrated throughout by Will Harmuth. Tissue paper protecting signature still present. Sharp cornered and without any internal markings. Bright, clean red full leather bound covers with gold gilt. Gold gilt lettering on spine intact and without any flaws. Spine is without wrinkling or sun damage. Hubbed spine, sewn in ribbon book mark, 22k gold gilded page edges for preservation, silk moire endpapers and sewn pages. Complete with the original issue 22 page "Notes from the Editor" gazette. An absolutely beautiful copy.
Ellison’s roman a clef was the only book he wrote that was published during his lifetime. It received some of the highest accolades at the time, including the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953. Saul Bellow stated, “This book holds its own among the best novels of the century.” Rumor has it that Richard Wright was the first to encourage Ellison to submit his writing, for a book review in the magazine New Masses.
Partly referencing Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” Ellison’s highly praised great American novel explores, among many other topics, dispossession, alienation, violence, and racism in America. Ellison focuses his view on the tense and often violent social and economic segregation between a post–Great Depression American society and African American citizens.
Ellison also worked for the Federal Writers’ Project, led by the Works Progress Administration, in the 1930s, conducting interviews and research on the effects of housing segregation on Harlem residents, as well as collecting documentation of lives and stories. It was through this project that Ellison collected a folk-lore narrative from interviewee Leo Gurley about “Sweet-the-monkey,” an archetypal Brer Rabbit–like trickster character who also happens to be, in a sense, an “invisible man” dealing with the paradox of invisibility as identity, all themes that Ellison’s unnamed narrator experiences throughout “Invisible Man.” This work, along with thousands of other artifacts, ephemera, and notes, can be found online via the Library of Congress, where Ellison’s personal library can be referenced through the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Correspondence, essays, visual materials, newspapers, writing drafts, and Ellison’s personal notes on his speeches, lectures, and novels can be referenced in detail. Ellison’s correspondence runs the gamut of noted literary figures, including Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Langston Hughes, Shirley Jackson, and Richard Wright.
Price: $750.00 other currencies