On March 1, 1914 Ralph Ellison was born. Today, we celebrate the author by reading his masterpiece Invisible Man. Here is why you should too.

"[Invisible Man was] charting a course for seeing in the black experience something that was larger than the sum of its parts."

Ellison at 100: Reading Invisible Man at the Schomburg Center (Watch excerpts of Invisible Man read by Bill T. Jones, Oren Jacoby and friends, Alondra Nelson, Deborah Willis, Jonathan McCrory, Greg Tate, and Terrance McKnight.)

"As a teenager, I was blown away by Invisible Man. The idea of black people being invisible and therefore, subject to all kinds of racial madness and violence was terrifying. But rereading Invisible Man as an adult was more disturbing, however. You see, it didn't occur to me then that Ellison wasn't talking to me, because frankly I could see him: the protagonist was my father, my brother, my lover, my friends, etc. Ellison was talking to a larger white audience, who maybe didn't want to see him. The book can be read as an unsuccessful plea for personhood—something that no one has a right to ask you to prove."

Steven G. Fullwood, Associate Curator, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Book Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

"Of America's racial crisis, Invisible Man may be the century's most translated, celebrated American novel. (In 1985 Invisible Manwas required reading for graduate students preparing to take a French national exam called l'agrégation.) It is a book with continuing word-of-mouth currency—passed around and 'thumbed to pieces,' as one critic observed, in libraries and homes."

Robert G. O'Meally in The Atlantic

"Invisible Man remains a terror. Ellison dramatized, as forcefully as any novelist of the last century, Stephen Dedalus’s vision of history. In Invisible Man we experience American history as a nightmare. Sixty years after the novel’s publication we still haven’t woken up."

Nathaniel Rich in The Daily Beast

"This is the tale of the often slapstick (mis)adventures of a nameless Negro American protagonist whose blues-drenched, pinball-like journey from the South to the North and from rural to city not only mirrored the historical trajectory of black folk, but whose search for identity resonates, even today, with all. The historical and psychological depth, the capturing of the range of polyglot American speech patterns, the intersection of individual desire for leadership and the ideological and political realities of the time, and the range of literary allusions—from Negro folktales and fictional predecessors ranging from Melville, Dostoevsky, Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner to James Weldon Johnson and Richard Wright—all combined in Ellison’s imagination and were conveyed in eloquent prose. The power of Invisible Man to still reach readers in their guts, hearts and minds—to relate to their sense of life, whether male or female, or from whatever ethnic or cultural background or nationality—is well-stated in the novel’s closing line: 'Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?'"

Greg Thomas in The Root

"Casting an eye around your frame of reference, you reach for comparable narratives, like the Odyssey or the Divine Comedy, where itinerant heroes have adventures, or bump into people and listen to them say astonishing things at length. But Invisible Man has something else going for it, a nightmarish sense of powerlessness... [I]f Invisible Man is the most fully-realized embodiment of your conscious eloquence, that’s a hell of a legacy."

Lydia Kiesling in The Millions