When Ralph Elli­son pub­lished his first nov­el, Invis­i­ble Man, in 1952, it took the lit­er­ary world by storm. Orville Prescott, a lit­er­ary crit­ic at The New York Times, wrote in April of ’52:

Ralph Ellison’s first nov­el, “The Invis­i­ble Man,” is the most impres­sive work of fic­tion by an Amer­i­can Negro which I have ever read. Unlike Richard Wright and Willard Mot­ley, who achieve their best effects by over­pow­er­ing their read­ers with doc­u­men­tary detail, Mr. Elli­son is a fin­ished nov­el­ist who uses words with great skill, who writes with poet­ic inten­si­ty and immense nar­ra­tive dri­ve. “Invis­i­ble Man” has many flaws. It is a sen­sa­tion­al and fever­ish­ly emo­tion­al book. It will shock and sick­en some of its read­ers. But, what­ev­er the final ver­dict on “Invis­i­ble Man” may be, it does mark the appear­ance of a rich­ly tal­ent­ed writer.

Invis­i­ble Man won the U.S. Nation­al Book Award for Fic­tion the fol­low­ing year. And the belief that Elli­son wrote some­thing spe­cial has­n’t dimin­ished since. Case in point: When Mod­ern Library cre­at­ed a list of the 100 best Eng­lish-lan­guage nov­els of the 20th cen­tu­ry, they placed Invis­i­ble Man at num­ber 19.

As Don Katz tells us above, the book touched him deeply dur­ing his col­lege years at NYU. Now the founder and CEO of Audible.com, he’s let­ting you down­load Invis­i­ble Man as a free audio­book. The free down­load is avail­able at Audi­ble and at Ama­zon until Decem­ber 31st. (Audi­ble is an Ama­zon sub­sidiary). Please note that you’ll need to cre­ate an account to get the down­load. But appar­ent­ly no payment/credit card info is required.

Sep­a­rate­ly, I should also men­tion that Audi­ble offers a free 30-day tri­al pro­gram, where they let you down­load two pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio­books. At the end of 30 days, you can decide whether to become an Audi­ble sub­scriber or not. Either way, you can keep the two free audio­books. Find more infor­ma­tion on that free tri­al pro­gram here.

Again, the links to down­load Invis­i­ble Man are here: Audi­ble — Ama­zon. And remem­ber, we have more free audio­books in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free. Most­ly clas­sics.

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Relat­ed Con­tent

Ralph Elli­son Reads from His Novel-in-Progress,Juneteenth, in Rare Video Footage (1966)

Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in Rare 1959 Audio

Though known for his long epic nov­els War and Peace and Anna Karen­i­na, Leo Tol­stoy wrote short sto­ries too. Below, you can stream read­ings of five such sto­ries, “The Three Her­mits,” “Three Deaths,” “Albert,” “Ernak, and “God Sees the Truth But Waits.” They’re read by Bart Wolfe, and made freely avail­able on Spo­ti­fy. (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s soft­ware, down­load it here.) If you want to get it from iTunes, it will run you $6.95.

This three-hour record­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free. Mean­while, if you’d like to down­load two pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio­books from Audi­ble for free, get more infor­ma­tion on that here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leo Tol­stoy Cre­ates a List of the 50+ Books That Influ­enced Him Most (1891)

Leo Tolstoy’s 17 “Rules of Life:” Wake at 5am, Help the Poor, & Only Two Broth­el Vis­its Per Month

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Leo Tol­stoy, and How His Great Nov­els Can Increase Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence

Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es

Select­ed by the Mod­ern Library as one of the 100 best nov­els of all time, Joseph Con­rad’s Heart of Dark­ness was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished as a three-part ser­i­al sto­ry in Black­wood’s Mag­a­zine in 1899, then lat­er as a novel­la in the 1902 col­lec­tion Youth: A Nar­ra­tive; and Two Oth­er Sto­ries. A com­plex and con­tro­ver­sial “med­i­ta­tion on colo­nial­ism, evil, and the thin line between civ­i­liza­tion and bar­bar­i­ty,” Heart of Dark­ness gained lit­er­ary stature dur­ing the 1950s and 1960s, before peak­ing in the late 1970s–precisely around when Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la released Apoc­a­lypse Now, a film loose­ly based on Con­rad’s tale. What halt­ed the novel­la’s momen­tum was a sting­ing rebuke from Chin­ua Achebe, father of mod­ern African lit­er­a­ture, who crit­i­cized the way it “projects the image of Africa as ‘the oth­er world,’ the antithe­sis of Europe and there­fore of civ­i­liza­tion…”

Despite the con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing the text, Heart of Dark­ness remains wide­ly read in Amer­i­can high schools and uni­ver­si­ties. And, notes Harold Bloom, it has “had a strik­ing influ­ence on writ­ers, artists, and thinkers from all over the globe.” Below, you can lis­ten to a read­ing of Heart of Dark­ness by British stage and voice actor Hay­ward Morse. It’s free on Spo­ti­fy and will be added to our list, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free. In Novem­ber, Ken­neth Branagh will release his own version–which you can down­load for free if you join Audible.com’s 30 free tri­al pro­gram. Oth­er free read­ings of Con­rad’s novel­la can be found on Lib­rivox.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Orson Welles Turns Heart of Dark­ness Into a Radio Dra­ma, and Almost His First Great Film

See the Orig­i­nal Mag­a­zine Pub­li­ca­tion of Heart of Dark­ness and Oth­er Great Works by Joseph Con­rad

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices