Still robust after all these years …

… Invisible Man at Seventy | The National Endowment for the Humanities. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Ellison’s work is a bildungsroman that chronicles the absurd, nightmarish, surreal, and, at times, hilarious journey of a nameless narrator. He lives in an underground dwelling illuminated by 1,369 lightbulbs stolen from Monopolated Light and Power, with Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue” sometimes blasting on the record player. He tells his story: Twenty years earlier, Dr. Bledsoe, the president of his Black college, expelled him from school for showing a poor Black family to a white trustee, and sent him to New York City, with fake promises of employment that left him stranded