Veteran watchers of the National Book Awards will note the first black writer to receive the prestigious award: Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1954). The award was a boon for Ellison financially: as he writes in his Introduction to Invisible Man, he had to catch work whenever he could. And the National Book Award also raised his status reputation-wise — he would become a literary eminence grise, collecting awards and courtesy professorships and sitting as a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters. It was less a boon for his writing: Ellison never wrote a major novel again. Subsequent winners of the National Book Awards have not suffered, presumably, from Ellison’s tragic writer’s block. But neither have they written — as Ellison had with Invisible Man — the novel of their era, or a book quite so articulate about the dilemma of individuality on such broad human terms, written with pathos and comedy.
This year’s most highly publicized winner, writing on the topic of race and winning in the “Non-Fiction” category, is Ta-Nehisi Coates. His book Between the World and Me
