While deemed as one of the greatest American novels written since World War II, Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" has been banned from school libraries in Randolph County, North Carolina, The Los Angeles Times reported. The book has long been seen as a seminal work of fiction, which deals with the honest realities of race in America.
The discussion about censoring "Invisible Man" was brought to a board meeting by Gary Mason. A parent of one student at one of the county's schools wrote a 12-page complaint, attacking the book's contents as inappropriate for his child to read, particularly for its lack of innocence, crude language and its sexual content.
"The narrator writes in the first person, emphasizing his individual experience and his feeling about the events portrayed in his life. The novel is not innocent. Instead, the book is filthier, too much for teenagers. I don't find any literary value," Mason argued.
The school board agreed, voting 5-2 to ban the book from the county's libraries.
"Invisible Man" won the 1953 U.S. National Book Award in 1953, and in 1998, the Modern Library ranked it 19th on its list of top 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine also it ranked it in its Top 100 books of the century.
In the novel, Ellison addresses several social and intellectual issues facing blacks in the early 20th century, such as black nationalism, and the reformist policies of slave turned educator and orator Booker T. Washington. The title derives from its autobiographically narrated protagonist, an unnamed black man who considers himself socially "invisible."
"So my task was one of revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of one who was both black and American... I am an invisible man. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me..." as narrated by the novel's protagonist
Ellison's own life mirrored his main character of the novel.
"I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century," Ellison wrote in the novel's prologue.
"Evenhandedly exposing the hypocrisies and stereotypes of all comers, Invisible Man is far more than a race novel, or even a bildungsroman. It's the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century," literary critic Lev Grossman once said about the novel.
Regardless of achieving the highest accolades, "Invisible Man" has been banned from this North Carolina county.
