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 & 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 & 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 & in the Harlem race riots & explains how he came to be living underground