In the 41 years since Invisible Man won the National Book Award, the author had made it clear to all that he was working on something that would be grander, more ambitious even, than his acknowledged masterpiece. In 1967, 14 years into his struggle, Ellison lost pieces of the manuscript in a New England house fire. Scholars have since largely dismissed the significance of the loss, about 200 pages, mostly revisions, most of which Ellison was able to retrieve. But he allowed the fire to take on psychological weight through the years and would talk of the loss as if it had caused an ever-deepening wound upon his artistic focus. More years passed, then decades. Ellison wrote essays, gave speeches and got invited to the White House. Medals were draped around his neck. He was praised in multiple languages. Biographies and dissertations were written. Seminars organized, conferences held.
But no second novel emerged
Invisible Man was relatively simple structurally, having a single narrator, a single perspective from which the entire book sprang forth. Even so, at a time when Ellison was barely scraping by as a freelance writer and living primarily on Fanny's secretary's salary, he still went about writing that novel with either admirable or damnable irreverence for time. He described that period as "an obscurity in which I had worked for five years undisturbed by thoughts of future sales or reviewers notices, and in which the possibility of winning prizes was utterly undreamed. My sole preoccupation had been with transforming a body of seemingly intractable material into a work of art."
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