A young Black man moves from the South to Harlem, joins a political movement, loses his identity in a riot, and ends up living underground, illuminated by 1,369 light bulbs. Ellison worked on this novel for seven years and never completed another. The prose is jazz: improvisatory, rhythmic, shifting from realism to surrealism without warning. The grandfather's deathbed advice haunts the narrator; the battle royal haunts American literature. The novel won the National Book Award and changed what American fiction could see. The invisible man is invisible because people refuse to see him. The light he burns underground is stolen from the power company. He is waiting.