According to The New York Times, Barack Obama modeled his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison's novel. Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland recognize a black existentialist vision with a ' Kafka-like absurdity'.

Time magazine included the novel in its 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 list, calling it 'the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century', rather than a 'race novel, or even a bildungsroman'. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, making Ellison the first African-American writer to win the award. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. But there is nothing about the novel tying it either to France or to the 1950s in fact, Gracq's novel, with its elaborate, richly detailed prose, will be of greater interest now than at any point in the last twenty years.Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's first novel, published by Random House in 1952. For many French readers The Opposing Shore (published as Le rivage des Syrtes ), with its theme of transgressions and boundaries, spoke to the issue of defeat and the desire to fail: a paticularly sensitive motif in postwar French literature. Besides the narrator there are two other main characters, the dark and laconic captain of the base and a woman whose compex relations to both sides of the war brings the narator deeper into the story's web. As the narrator comes to understand, everything depends upon a boundary, unseen but certain, separating the two sides. Across the bay is territory of the enemy who has, for three hundred years, been at war with the narrator's countrymen the battle has become a complex, tacit game in which no actions are taken and no peace declared. The fort lies at the country's border at its feet is the bay of Syrtes. Set in a fictitious Mediterranean port city, The Opposing Shore is the first-person account of a young aristocrat sent to observe the activities of a naval base.

As the latest work in the Twentieth-Century Continental Fiction Series, Gracq'a masterpiece is now available for the first time in English. A mysterious and retiring figure, Gracq characteristically refused the Goncourt, France's most distinguished literary prize, when it was awarded to him in 1951 for this book. With four elegant and beautifully crafted novels Julien Gracq has established himself as one of France's premier postwar novelists.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison