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"I am an invisible man," announces the anonymous protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. "No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." Among the best known opening lines in American fiction, these words might also serve as an epitaph to Ellison's later life. Essentially a one- book author, he spent the last half of his life at work on a second novel, part of which was destroyed in a fire in 1967. Up until almost the very day of his death on April 16, 1994, Ellison followed the same schedule, reported in an interview with David Remnick in the New Yorker. Rising early, he left his modest Harlem apartment to buy a paper on Broadway.
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