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., TimeThe 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
"The story of a black man who passes for white and becomes a race-baiting U.S. senator. When he is shot on the Senate floor, the first visitor in hospital is a black musician-turned-preacher who raised him. As the two men talk, their respective stories come out"--
[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 
