Abstract From the time of its first appearance in the spring of 1952 Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has been thrusting itself forward, ever more insistently with the passage of each year, as a commanding masterpiece in the literature of American fiction—and, now that it has had a career of a half-century, all that I want here to try to do is to suggest something of what it is that accounts for the kind of powerful claim that it continues to exert upon us. Ours is, of course, a period marked by an efflorescence of fictional talent on the American scene more notable surely than any comparable European insurgency. Yet, in its representative expressions, it is a talent, for all its variety, that—in such writers as William Gass and John Barth and Donald Barthelme—often chooses to dwell (as the title of a book on recent American fiction by the English critic Tony Tanner says) in a City of Words. Bellow and Styron and Updike and certain others, in their commitment to the traditional arts of narrative, remain sufficiently unreconstructed as to conceive the novel to be a mode of feigned history, but they, though retaining a large and devoted readership, may not embody what Matthew Arnold called “the tone of the centre.” For those who are advancing the new poetics of fiction take it for granted (as William Gass says) “that literature is language, that stories and the places and the people in them are merely made of words as chairs are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth or metal tubes,” and thus, since “there are no events but words in fiction,” they think of the novelistic craft as simply an affair of putting words together in new and surprising combinations—which record nothing other than the event of the writer’s having done certain interesting things with language itself.