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Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of man's search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1930s.

In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware.

Through the protagonist, Ellison explored the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation.

The novel, with its treatment of taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism, won the 1953 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death.

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