Overview

From the author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth is a powerful and brilliantly crafted tale that explores themes of identity, race, and ambition. ""[A] stunning achievement. . . . 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 The story follows Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator, whose life takes an unexpected turn when he calls for Alonzo Hickman, an old Black minister, to be by his side as he faces a mortal wound. As the two men intimately share their stories and memories, the true shape and substance of the past begin to emerge.  Here is Ellison, a virtuoso of American vernacular—the preacher’s hyperbole and the politician’s rhetoric, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech—at the height of his powers, telling a moving, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century.  With an introduction and additional notes by John F. Callahan, who first compiled Juneteenth out of thousands of manuscript pages in 1999, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles R. Johnson. “Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, Juneteenth, like Invisible Man, deserves to be read and reread by generations.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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Reviews

[A] vastly ambitious informing allegory, an allegory made rich, as in Invisible Man, with the sensory details of which Ellison was such a master. -The New York Review of Books [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 Juneteenth . . . threatens to come as close as any since Huckleberry Finn to grabbing the ring of the Great American Novel. -Los Angeles Times Eloquent, ardent, and worth the wait. . . . Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, Juneteenth, like Invisible Man, deserves to be read and reread by generations. --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Author Information

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 Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He is the editor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and the Modern Library edition of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison and is literary executor of Ralph Ellison’s estate.   Charles Johnson is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Washington. A MacArthur fellow, he is the author of twenty-five books, among them the novel Middle Passage, which received the 1990 National Book Award for fiction

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