Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man has elicited more than its share of critical attention ever since its first appearance in 1952. It continues to fascinate critics because, like one of its forebears, James Joyce's Ulysses, Ellison's novel contains enough material to occupy them for a very long time, no matter what their reading orientation might be. According to Crushing Strout, “Invisible Man has generated metaphysical, psychological, existential, symbolist, and folkloristic readings – all of which have their basis not only in critical fashion but in the fecundity of the novel's linguistic energy” (80). What's more, Strout's list of possible interpretive orientations doesn't begin to exhaust the fecundity of approaches one can take to the text. Ellison's novel continues to call for new ways of being read, new contexts in which to be placed so as to be better understood and appreciated.
In this article I examine the editing and publishing of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man by Albert Erskine. Over the course of the piece, I deploy letters, drafts, and other material drawn from both Ellison's archive in the Library of Congress and Erskine's own archive at the University of Virginia to unpack how Erskine, as a white editor at a powerful international publishing house, conceived of his role in shepherding to market and marketing what he saw as a major literary work by an African American author.
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