25 of the Best Covers for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
On the Novel's 67th Birthday
Sixty-seven years ago, on April 14, 1952, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was published to instant critical acclaim. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, and has continued to be an enduring classic, affecting generation after generation of readers and thinkers. The cover of the first edition is rightly iconic, but I realized that it’s the only one I ever see, so I dug around to see what other treatments Ellison’s masterpiece has gotten over the years. Here, for your scrolling pleasure, are 25 of the best that I found.
First edition, Random House, 1952, design by Edward McKnight Kauffer
Victor Gollancz, London, 1953
Signet Books 1953, cover by James Avati
Einaudi (Italy), 1956
Modern Library, 1963
Penguin Modern Classics, 1965, cover illustration by Alan Aldridge
Penguin Classics, 1965
Vintage Books 30th Anniversary Edition, 1972
Knopf, 1972
Penguin Modern Classics, 1976
Vintage Books, 1980
Einaudi (Italy), 1993
Vintage, 1995
Penguin Modern Classics, 2001
Penguin Modern Classics UK, 2001
Penguin Classics, 2001
Grasset (France), 2002
ALLFA (Romania), 2012
Vintage, 2012, design by Cardon Webb
José Olympio (Brazil), 2013
Penguin UK, 2014
Κέδρος (Greece), 2017
Ex Libris (Croatia), 2018
Solum Forlag (Norway), 2018
Aufbau Verlag (Germany), 2019
