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 This month we bring you one of the most important publications in the Modern Library's recent history—the long-awaited, definitive edition of Ralph Ellison's second novel. In 1999, Random House published Juneteenth—a partial, edited manuscript that was billed as Ellison's second novel but was in actuality only the most contained and finished portion of what Ellison had labored over for 40-odd years. Indeed, Juneteenth represented only around 350 pages of the more than 3,000 manuscript pages of the novel that Ellison had left at his death. Later this month, the Modern Library will publish the complete version of Ellison's final manuscript, entitled Three Days Before the Shooting...: The Unfinished Second Novel. It is sure to be a landmark event in American letters.
John F. Callahan, Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College and literary executor of Ralph Ellison's estate, along with Adam Bradley, associate professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, undertook the immense task of creating this edition, with supporting notes, introductions, and other scholarly material included for interested readers and scholars. Graciously, they agreed to tell us more about this remarkable project:
Modern Library: Tell us about how long it took to compile and edit 'Three Days Before The Shooting...' and how you each came to the project.
Editors: Mrs. Ellison took me (John Callahan) into Ralph's study two days after his funeral and asked for my help gathering up and deciding what to do about the novel he left behind. She did not know how close or far away it was from completion. Ralph's old friend David Sarser printed every file on Ralph's computer. I copied them, had one shipped to Oregon in the summer of 1994, and asked a bright, uncommonly dedicated and diligent undergraduate student of mine named Adam Bradley to assist me in collating the files. That was the beginning. Off and on, sometimes working together, sometimes separately, Adam and I went through the most recent material, several thousand pages of computer printouts composed in the last decade or so of Ralph's life.
During 1995-96, as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, I looked for what I hoped would be transitional pages in the Ellison apartment and in his papers, which were given to the Library of Congress in 1995, and combed through Ralph's copious notes for clues to the book's organization. Finally convinced no such transitions existed, I edited what I considered the work's central narrative, the fullest, most recently revised typescript of Book II, for the most part, and published this section of the novel as Juneteenth in 1999, to be followed, I hoped, by something like the present Modern Library edition.
In the mean time, Adam, now a graduate student at Harvard, kept on going through the episodes and sections that Ellison had composed and revised on his two computers. A Ph.D. dissertation intervened for Adam, then his Book of Rhymes, and a long-aspired-to novel for me. But we kept in close touch, kept working on Ellison, and began plotting out the shape of this volume, working more and more intensely and single-mindedly from 2007 to the present.
Modern Library: Tell us a bit about the three parts 'Three Days Before The Shooting...' is divided into and what supporting material a reader can expect.
Editors: The first two parts of Three Days are the fullest, most recent typescripts of Books I and II. An important episode called "Bliss's Birth" dated 1965 in Ellison's hand—that's Part I. Part II consists of the most revised and recent printouts of three sequences of narrative composed on the computer: "Hickman in Washington, DC;" "Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma," and "McIntyre at Jesse Rockmore's," the latter a version of Chapter 12 from Book I as revised on the computer in 1993. Parts I and II have editor's notes, as do the supplemental materials in Part III. In addition to the general introduction to the volume, we have included an introduction to Part II, which provides a full context for, and the literary implications of, Ellison's composition on the computer in his later years.
Of great interest to readers of Three Days, we believe, will be the selection in Part III of Ellison's notes, two early drafts of the opening chapter of Book II, several variants of the prologue composed on the computer in the late '80s and early '90s, and all eight excerpts from the unfinished novel as published by Ellison during his lifetime. These supporting materials show Ellison conceiving his novel and attempting to execute and improvise his evolving plan for the work.
To read the rest of the Q&A with the editors of THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING..., including thoughts on the enduring literary value of INVISIBLE MAN, why Ellison continued to work on the second novel for so many years, and the archival material used in the process, please click here.
Readers are being reintroduced to the master of American vernacular—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.
Happy Reading!
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