In 1953, one year after the publication of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Hugh Hefner launched his men's magazine, Playboy. The magazine's centerfold featured a nude Marilyn Monroe posed against a striking red velvet curtain. The photograph was taken in 1949 as Ellison was working diligently on the novel, and it became a quintessential example of American femininity, an icon of American cultural history. As a photographer, art student, and collector of painting and portraiture, Ellison understood the power of visual images. He liked to look at pictures. In his novel, Ellison describes a nude woman that seems to invoke the Playboy image: ''the red robe swept aside like a veil, and I went breathless at the petite and generously curved nude, framed delicate and firm in the glass.'' This nameless woman, ''acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility'' (Invisible 409), has a sexual affair with the protagonist and she appears in the novel just as invisible man confronts ''The Woman Question.'' Ellison's artful description of the woman's symbolic role, like Monroe's pose, suggests complicity in a well-known and longstanding iconography of female difference and sexual objectification that critics have argued amounts to nothing more than a literary pinup.