Recommendations
Books Like Invisible Man
Best books to read after Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the great American novel of racial identity — an unnamed Black narrator's journey through the American South and Harlem as he reckons with a society that refuses to see him as an individual. These recommendations continue the Ellison canon, explore the tradition of the African American novel, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the book that most seriously investigates what it means to be invisible in America.
- 1Buy
Native Son
by Richard Wright
The predecessor and companion in the tradition of the African American protest novel — Bigger Thomas in Depression-era Chicago, in a naturalistic novel that is angrier and more despairing than Ellison's but equally central to understanding the tradition Invisible Man works in and against; Ellison's novel is in part a literary response to Wright's deterministic vision.
- 2Buy
Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
The companion in the tradition of Black American literary fiction — Baldwin's semi-autobiographical first novel about a Harlem teenager's religious awakening, written at the same moment as Ellison's novel and sharing its interest in the interior life of a Black man negotiating American identity; Baldwin and Ellison are the two great African American novelists of the postwar era.
- 3Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
The Harlem Renaissance companion — Janie Crawford's search for self-determination in Florida, written in 1937 in Hurston's lyrical Black vernacular prose; the predecessor to Invisible Man in the tradition of the African American novel that places a Black protagonist's inner life at the center of literary fiction.
- 4Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
The companion in the tradition of the great African American novel — Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning story of Sethe, an escaped slave haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed rather than see returned to slavery; the successor to Invisible Man as the novel that most profoundly reckons with the legacy of slavery and its aftermath in American life.
- 5Buy
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
The companion nonfiction text — Malcolm X's account of his journey from street criminal to Black Muslim minister, the most widely read first-person account of Black radical politics in America and a natural companion for readers of Invisible Man's exploration of political organization and Black identity.
- 6Buy
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
The contemporary British counterpart — Smith's debut novel about multicultural North London, which shares Invisible Man's interest in what happens to identity when a person is defined by their race or ethnicity rather than their individuality; the novel that inaugurated a new conversation about race and identity in twenty-first-century literary fiction.
- 7Buy
Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
The contemporary heir to Ellison's tradition — Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in which the Underground Railroad is a literal subway system, a magical realist historical novel that shares Invisible Man's interest in what freedom actually means for a Black person in America.
- 8Buy
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
The companion Morrison — Milkman Dead's journey from Michigan to the South in search of family origins, a novel that shares Invisible Man's structure of a journey toward self-knowledge and its interest in the relationship between personal identity and collective Black history.
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