Ralph Ellison - Juneteenth

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 Monthly

Ralph Ellisons 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

[F]irst-rate Ellison, exploring race and America in dreamlike prose.

The Wall Street Journal

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

Ellisons writerly skills are awesome. He enables us to relive the astonishment of the first generation to experience the movies and reanimates the commonplace pleasures of a type of boyhood that may never come again. He recaptures the heated fervor of the revival tent so vividly that you feel yourself begin to sweat.

Houston Chronicle

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

New York

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

USA Today

Juneteenth contains the most resonant and alluring uses of the American idiom Ive read in a while. It rolls and riffs. Get down to the bookstore and open it and read, brothers and sisters, read.

D. T. Max, The New York Observer

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 ever quite what it seems, nor stays that way for long, and where absolutely nothing is purely black and white.

Newsweek

Juneteenth is a cause for celebration.

The Christian Science Monitor

More than anything, Ellison was a passionate writer, and passion is unquestionably present in Juneteenth.

The Boston Globe

Ellison may be the greatest of jazz sermonizers and homiletic blues guitarists ever to write fiction.

The Nation

A riotous revel in what H. L. Mencken called The American Language, which Ralph Ellison has taken to his beloved Territory and back again.

Mirabella

A uniquely American drama of independence and codependency set in a world of conspicuous racial fractures and invisible solidarities.

Boston Review of Books

A work so long in process that it assumed legendary status decades ago, the successor to Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man appears at last. It is a work of rare and doubtless unique intelligence, purpose, and powera generous legacy bequeathed to us, persuasive testimony to the genius of Ralph Ellison.

Kirkus Reviews

Juneteenth may be one of the most important books of the year, if not the decade. An eloquent, intelligent, and worthwhile statement on race relations in the country during the twentieth century.

The Tampa Tribune-Times

Ellison stands as one of the exemplary writers of the century. This painstakingly assembled edition keeps his genius visible.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Demanding, dense, and undeniably brilliant.

Rocky Mountain News

On display throughout the novel are Ellisons wit, his marvelous ear for language, and his sublime intellectual approach to the visceral issues eating at Americas heart.

The Star-Ledger

The fun of reading this bookand there is some fun on every pagecomes from Ellisons familiarity with African-American folklore and literature.

San Jose Mercury News

Ellisons signature preoccupations with language and the racial markings of American Identity stream through a beautifully written tale.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Ellison, both as a prose writer and literary thinker, was and is an American master.

The Denver Post

Ellisons long-delayed second novel is a fitting testament to his talent.

The Dallas Morning News

Thanks to the astute and dedicated editing of John Callahan, we have a book that can fairly be called Ralph Ellisons second masterpiece. Juneteenth is, quite simply, a great American novel.

The Oregonian

Invisible Man
Shadow and Act
Going to the Territory
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
Flying Home and Other Stories

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 the Modern Library edition of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison and is literary executor of Ralph Ellisons estate.

Charles Johnson, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of Writing at the University of Washington, received the 1990 National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage.

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 2000

Copyright 1999 by Fanny Ellison
Introduction and Afterword copyright 1999 by John Callahan
Preface copyright 2000 by Charles Johnson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of Juneteenth were previously published in different form in The New Yorker, TheNoble Savage, and The Quarterly Review of Literature.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from Section III of Little Gidding from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1942 by T. S. Eliot and copyright renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Rights throughout the world excluding the United States are controlled by Faber and Faber Limited. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Limited.