A selection of Great American Novels against the USA Stars and Stripes flag.

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Reading lists

Great American Novels you should read

A flatlay of five Penguin Classics covers against a red background.

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Penguin Classics at 75: five landmark books that shaped the iconic series

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Extracts

‘What did I do to be so black and blue?’ – Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man

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'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times 
 
'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves' 
 
Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans. 
 
This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation. 
 
With an Introduction by John F. Callahan 
 
'Brilliant' Saul Bellow

One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century

A brilliant individual victory . . . proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries

A stunning block-buster of a book that will floor and flabbergast some people, bedevil and intrigue others, and keep everybody reading right through to its explosive end

Don't try to write the Great American Novel, it has already been done . . . any US epic must address race, which remains the greatest single issue the country faces.

Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-94) was born in Oklahoma. In 1936 he went to New York, where he met the writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; shortly afterwards his stories and articles began to appear in magazines and journals. His debut novel, Invisible Man (1952), won the National Book Award and established Ellison as a major figure in twentieth-century fiction.

Flying Home And Other Stories

Raw, lyrical and blazing with intensity, these short stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man. 
 
'He saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold' 
 
Ranging from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlour, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War, they all display the musically layered voices, soaring language and sheer ebullience that made Ellison a giant of twentieth-century American writing. Written early in Ellison's career, several of these fourteen stories were unpublished in his lifetime, including 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' which features in this collection for the first time. 
 
'Approach the simple elegance of Chekhov' Washington Post

Juneteenth

Published after Ellison's death, this follow-up to Invisible Man is a thunderous epic of memory, faith, loss and identity. 
 
'Words are your business, boy. Not just the Word. Words are everything' 
 
'Tell me what happened while there's still time,' demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate black baptist minister he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young orphan, Sunraider was taken in and raised by Hickman, before reinventing himself as a racist politician. Now, as the two men confront the truth about their shared past in a final reckoning, Ellison's masterly novel takes in memories of a southern childhood, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and the richness of the African-American experience. 
 
'Majestic' Toni Morrison

New Penguin Essentials edition of Ralph Ellison's blistering, impassioned novel of African-American lives in 1940s America, Invisible Man. 
 
'I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.' 
 
Defeated and embittered by a country which treats him as a non-being, the 'invisible man' retreats into an underground cell, where he smokes, drinks, listens to jazz and recounts his search for identity in white society: as an optimistic student in the Deep South, in the north with the black activist group the Brotherhood, and in the Harlem race riots. And explains how he came to be living underground . . .

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma in 1914. He studied music and in 1936 went to live in New York. He started contributing to the Federal Writers' Project (part of Roosevelt's New Deal) and soon his short stories and articles were published. After returning from war service in the Merchant Marines, he concentrated on his writing and, in 1952, his masterpiece Invisible Man was published, seven years after he started it. This established Ellison as a major literary figure. He died in 1994.

'I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.' 
 
Defeated and embittered by a country which treats him as a non-being, the 'invisible man' retreats into an underground cell, where he smokes, drinks, listens to jazz and recounts his search for identity in white society: as an optimistic student in the Deep South, in the north with the black activist group the Brotherhood, and in the Harlem race riots. And explains how he came to be living underground . . .

Ralph Ellison

Books by Ralph Ellison

Articles featuring Ralph Ellison

Great American Novels you should read

Penguin Classics at 75: five landmark books that shaped the iconic series

‘What did I do to be so black and blue?’ – Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

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