![]() ![]() Mortally wounded, he summons the elderly Hickman to his bedside. As the book opens, Sunraider is delivering a typically bigoted peroration on the Senate floor when he's peppered by an assassin's bullets. Instead, Juneteenth revolves around just two characters: Adam Sunraider, a white, race-baiting New England senator, and Alonzo "Daddy" Hickman, a black Baptist minister who turns out to have a paradoxical (and paternal) relationship to his opposite number. Gone are the epic proportions that Ellison so clearly envisioned. Or would it? Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan, has now quarried a smaller, more coherent work from all that raw material. ![]() ![]() Apparently Ellison's second novel would never appear. Yet this mythical mountain of prose was clearly unfinished, far too sketchy and disjointed to publish. When Ellison died in 1994, he left behind some 2,000 pages of manuscript. Then he spent decades reconstructing, revising, and expanding his initial vision. First, a large section of the novel went up in flames when the author's house burned in 1967. Ellison's follow-up, however, seemed truly bedeviled-not only by its monumental predecessor, but by fate itself. Alternating phantasmagoria with rock-ribbed realism, it delved into the blackest (and whitest!) corners of the American psyche, and quickly attained the status of legend. Invisible Man, which Ralph Ellison published in 1952, was one of the great debuts in contemporary literature. ![]()
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