‘Do you think he died of dispossession?’ That’s the facetious question the nameless hero of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, asks the audience at a rally in New York City in the 1930s. He is a smart and ambitious but naive young man who has fallen into the hands of a radical faction — no doubt the American Communist party — who want to use him to stir up black activism in Harlem.