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Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He lost his father to an accident when he was two, and soon the family’s life became displaced and economically insecure. Ralph became fascinated and knowledgeable about music, a passion that remained his entire life and that influenced his writing. He attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and was significantly influenced by professors and the wide reading they encouraged. Following a pattern of forging his own way in many pursuits of his life, Ellison left Tuskegee before finishing a degree and moved to Harlem, New York City, in 1936. He was thinking of studying sculpture, but he was immersed in the literary and dramatic and artistic culture of the late Harlem Renaissance. He met Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Romare Bearden, among many others — all influences, all context to his self-education, but characteristically subsidiary to his strong independent core of personality and ambition.
After serving in the Merchant Marine in WWII, Ellison, with the critical financial and editorial support of his second wife, wrote Invisible Man, published in 1952, It is difficult to step back from such a landmark American novel and understand the revolution packed into a seemingly simple account of the life of an unnamed Black man in Harlem in the 1930s. It was not so much an exterior new form as a transfusion of interior power manifested in language, visions, and metaphor. The novel won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison spent the rest of his life writing many published essays, thousands of pages toward a second novel which was never published in his lifetime, and teaching in the universities that represented a formal education which he walked away from so early in his life. His influence may be seen everywhere in American literature, also in world literature; it may be much discussed and traced, but ultimately it is incalculable, visible and invisible simultaneously.
Juneteenth [Modern Library hardcover]
Juneteenth [Modern Library hardcover]
$25.00
The radiant, posthumous second novel by the visionary author of Invisible Man, featuring an introduction and a new postscript by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson
“Ralph Ellison’s generosity, humor and nimble language are, of course, on display in Juneteenth, but it is his vigorous intellect that rules the novel. . . . A majestic narrative concept.”—Toni Morrison
In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from New England, is mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Alonzo Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. The reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. “Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying Sunraider.
Out of their conversation, and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne in silence for many long years, a story emerges. Senator Sunraider, once known as Bliss, was raised by Reverend Hickman in a black community steeped in religion and music (not unlike Ralph Ellison’s own childhood home) and was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and the Southwest. Together one last time, the two men retrace the course of their shared life in an “anguished attempt,” Ellison once put it, “to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning.” In the end, the two men confront their most painful memories, memories that hold the key to understanding the mysteries of kinship and race that bind them, and to the senator’s confronting how deeply estranged he had become from his true identity.
In Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison evokes the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech to tell a powerful tale of a prodigal son in the twentieth century. At the time of his death in 1994, Ellison was still expanding his novel in other directions, envisioning a grand, perhaps multivolume, story cycle. Always, in his mind, the character Hickman and the story of Sunraider’s life from birth to death were the dramatic heart of the narrative. And so, with the aid of Ellison’s widow, Fanny, his literary executor, John Callahan, has edited this magnificent novel at the center of Ralph Ellison’s forty-year work in progress—its author’s abiding testament to the country he so loved and to its many unfinished tasks.