He receives a scholarship to college from a group of white men in his town after engaging in a blindfolded boxing match with other black boys, to the delight of the white spectators. The unnamed black protagonist of the novel, set between the South in the nineteen-twenties and Harlem in the nineteen-thirties, wrestles with the cognitive dissonance of opportunity served up alongside indignity. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” Ellison writes in the prologue. Looking for guidance, I picked up Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, “Invisible Man,” which had been a fixture of the “next to read” pile on my bookshelf for years. Before then, I had envisioned my classroom as a place for my students to escape the world’s harsher realities, but Martin’s death made the dream of such escapism seem impossible and irrelevant. Invisible Man is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the Negro's anomalous position in American society.In 2012, I was a high-school English teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland, when Trayvon Martin, a boy who looked like so many of my students, was killed in the suburbs of Florida. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed-as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity of the blindness of others. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant.

After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience of the hero's high school days, moves quickly to the campus of a Southern Negro college and then to New York's Harlem, where most of the action takes place.

It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching-yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life.

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