"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is an essential American classic. Written in the late 1940s, it tells the story of a young African American man who moves north during the Harlem Renaissance and faces many trials as he attempts to find his place in society.

Invisible Man, novel by Ralph Ellison was published in 1952. It was Ellison’s only novel to be published during his lifetime. Invisible Man is widely acknowledged as one of the great novels of American literature and a landmark in African American literature, winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, the first novel by a Black author to receive that honor.
The narrator of Invisible Man is a nameless young Black man who moves in a 20th-century United States where reality is surreal and who can survive only through pretense. Because the people he encounters “see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination,” he is effectively invisible. He leaves the South for New York City, but his encounters continue to disgust him. Ultimately, he retreats to a hole in the ground, which he furnishes and makes his home. There, brilliantly illuminated by stolen electricity, he can seek his identity; as he says, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”

PS
I also posted this event in my World Book Classics Group.