Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

Before he has a name, before he understands anything, a boy is shoved blindfolded into a boxing ring to brawl with other Black boys while drunk white men in tuxedos roar, then made to scramble for gold coins scattered across a rug wired to give shocks. That humiliation is the narrator's education, and Ralph Ellison spends the rest of the book teaching him the lesson underneath it: a Black man in America is not hidden, he is unseen, real to every institution only as the symbol it needs him to be. A Southern college, a Harlem street-corner, a political brotherhood that wants a voice and not a man, each hands him an identity cut for someone else's face, and each one costs him more. Ellison wrote it in prose that swings and riffs like the Louis Armstrong record the narrator loves, grief turned somehow into invention. He ends underground, in a room he has lit with 1,369 stolen bulbs, blazing against the dark that refused to look at him.