In any American audience, he contends, the variety and openness of life here practically ensures that someone will have an artistic taste that matches that of the performer.

In a 1978 essay, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” Ellison recalls a music teacher at Tuskegee who admonished him always to play his best in any situation- “even if it’s only in the waiting room of Chehaw Station”-because “in this country there will always be a little man hidden behind the stove.” Ellison uses the metaphor to launch a meditation on American identity. Invisible Man earned the National Book Award-beating out Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea-and it became one of the literary backbones of the early civil rights movement. The novel is written in the cadence of the blues Ellison, according to James Baldwin, was among the first authors to integrate the irony and humor of black American culture into literature. His most famous work, Invisible Man, published in 1952, tells the story of an unnamed black protagonist who’s rendered unseeable by racism in pre-civil rights America. He wanted to universalize the black American experience by linking it to the larger American story and, ultimately, to the human struggle itself. A self-identified “Negro,” born on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, Ellison-with African, European, and Native American features-embodied in his life the American ethnic archetype.

One American who attempted such a reconciliation was the novelist Ralph Ellison. Can America’s background be reconciled with the idea of a universalist civilization?

On the other, those documents govern a country settled by a specific ethnic group, with a specific history and culture-English Protestants, with British traditions of law and justice and European art and philosophy-that once failed to live up to those principles. On the one hand, the nation’s founding documents express the universalist humanist principles of liberty and equality. A historical tension lies at the center of the American nation.

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