Juneteenth

Introduction

In his later years, after hours, if he had put in a good day at his desk, Ralph Ellison was known to chuckle at the parallel between the crazy country he loved and contended with and what in 1969 he called his novel in progress (very long in progress). Ellison s projected second novel was a glint in his eye as early as June 1951, when he wrote Albert Murray that he was trying to get going on my next book before this one [Invisible Man] is finished . . . In April 1953 he told Murray of his plan to scout the Southwest. I ve got to get real mad again, and talk with the old folks a bit. I ve got one Okla. book in me I do believe. By 1954 Ellison had begun to put pen to paper, and in April 1955 he sent Murray a working draft of an episode. From then on, even as he wrote numerous essays, taught at half a dozen colleges, held the Albert Schweitzer Professorship in the Humanities at New York University, and, in the name of citizenship, did more than his duty on national boards and commissions, the second novel remained Ellison s hound of heaven (and hell) pursuing him down the arches of the years, pursuing him down the labyrinthine ways/Of [his] own mind until the end of his life in 1994.

From 1955 to 1957 Ellison was at work on the second novel as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. It was in Rome during 1956, he told John Hersey, that he conceived the basic situation, which had to do with a political assassination. Not too long afterward, in June 1959, Ellison wrote Murray that Bellow [with whom Ellison was sharing a house in Tivoli, New York, close to Bard College, where both men taught] has read book two and is to publish about fifty pages in a new mag which he is editing THE NOBLE SAVAGE of all things. Telling David Remnick of The New Yorker in 1994 that Ellison had let me read a considerable portion of it a couple of hundred pages, at least, Bellow remembered vividly that all of it was marvelous stuff, easily on a level with

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952), winner of the National Book Award and one of the most important and influential American novels of the twentieth century, as well as numerous essays and short stories. He died in New York City in 1994.

John F. Callahan is the Emeritus Professor at Lewis & Clark College. He has been the editor or writer of numerous volumes related to African American and twentieth-century literature. As Ralph Ellison s literary executor, Callahan edited the Modern Library edition of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison.

Charles Johnson is the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage and Dreamer.

For anyone who cares about American literature and the seemingly insolvable pain of race, Juneteenth is a must-read. USA Today

Juneteenth is written with unmistakable Ellisonian zest, depth, and elegance. . . . The work holds together as a complete, aesthetically satisfying, and at times thrilling whole. The Atlantic

Impressionistic, jazzy, and Faulknerian, assembled from stories inside of stories, dreams, flights of memory, and bolts of rhetoric. New York

First-rate Ellison, exploring race and America in dreamlike prose. The Wall Street Journal

Ellison wrote better sentences than just about anybody. . . . Juneteenth is good the first time, better the second. His meanings slip and slide, they are associative, like American culture, where nothing is every quite what it seems, nor stays that way for long, and where absolutely nothing is purely black and white. Newsweek

A stunning achievement . . . Juneteenth is a tour de force of untutored eloquence. Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time