SOURCE: An obituary in The New York Times, April 17, 1994, p. 38.

[Lyons is an American journalist. In the excerpt below, he provides an overview of Ellison's life.]

Ralph Ellison, whose widely read novel Invisible Man was a stark account of racial alienation that foreshadowed the attention Americans eventually paid to divisions in their midst, died yesterday [16 April 1994] in his apartment on Riverside Drive. He was 80.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his editor, Joe Fox.

Mr. Ellison's seminal novel, Invisible Man, which was written over a seven-year period and published by Random House in 1952, is a chronicle of a young black man's awakening to racial discrimination and his battle against the refusal of Americans to see him apart from his ethnic background, which in turn leads to humiliation and disillusionment.

Invisible Man has been viewed as one of the most important works of fiction in the 20th century, has...