In the summer of 1945, Ralph Ellison, an Oklahoma-born, Harlem-based writer, wrote those words in Waitsfield, Vermont. World War II was ending, and Ellison was on sick leave from his duties as a merchant mariner. He originally came to Vermont to write a war novel with a racial twist involving white and Black Americans in a German POW camp. But, from his own account, those words about invisibility traveled from the innermost region of his mind to paper. Seven years later, in 1952, those words formed the opening sentences of the prologue of Invisible Man, Ellison’s first and only novel.
