Juneteenth

[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

From Ralph Ellison, author of the classic novel Invisible Man, the long-awaited second great narrative—with a new preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson and an updated introduction by Ellison’s literary executor John F. Callahan.

Here is the master 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 powerful, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century.

“Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying senator Adam Sunraider to the Reverend A. Z. Hickman, the itinerant Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. His history encompasses camp meetings where he became the risen Lazarus to inspire the faithful; the more ordinary joys of Southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker; lovemaking with a young woman in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?

With an updated introduction and additional notes by John F. Callahan, who first compiled Juneteenth out of thousands of manuscript pages in 1999, and a new introduction by National Book Award-winning author Charles R. Johnson, this brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise novel is the work of an American master.