Juneteenth

Juneteenth (1999) is the second novel by American writer Ralph Ellison. It was published posthumously, compiled as a 368-page condensation of material from more than 2,000 pages written by him over a period of 40 years. He had never completed a manuscript from this material. Ellison's longtime friend and literary executor, biographer and critic John F. Callahan, created the novel. He edited it in the way he believed that Ellison would have wanted it to be written. A fuller version of the manuscript was published as Three Days Before the Shooting... on February 2, 2010. History Ellison began work on his second novel around 1954, following the 1952 publication of Invisible Man and its success. Part of the original manuscript of Juneteenth was destroyed by a fire in 1967, and Ellison claimed to be devastated by the loss. But biographer Arnold Rampersad later speculated that the loss of the crucial, irrecoverable sections of his manuscript appears to have been something Ellison concocted after the fact to justify his lack of progress. In his 2007 biography of Ellison, Rampersad points out that, following the fire, Ellison wrote to critic Nathan Scott of his relief that he still "fortunately had a full copy" of all his writing. In different interviews, Ellison described his lost manuscript pages were described as "360 pages, and "500 pages", and "about a summer’s worth of revisions".