In 1965, the American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren reviewed Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952):

No one has made more unrelenting statements of the dehumanizing pressures that have been put upon the Negro. And Invisible Man is, I should say, the most powerful artistic representation we have of the Negro under these dehumanizing conditions; and at the same time, a statement of the human triumph over those conditions.