Around the time it was published, in addition to writing essays and short stories, Ellison began another novel, which he worked on for most of the Fifties and Sixties. Ever since, it has been a high-school classic and a key African-American book.

Invisible Man was an immediate prize-winning success. The radiant, posthumous second novel by the visionary author of Invisible Man, featuring an introduction and a new postscript by Ralph Ellisons literary. The novel ends by sharing invisibility: ‘Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’ But the triumph of the book is the formation of a voice, of invisibility and ‘buggy jiving’, which ultimately becomes authoritative. With a new introduction by National Book Award-winning author and scholar Charles R. Ellison’s Juneteenth text appears to be built on the author’s careful synthesis of two of the most important literary chroniclers of Negro American experience (a term that Ellison may have sensed edging out the door by 1965) to come before him: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. His struggles, with social and political pressures, personal humiliations, his state of non-being or ‘hibernation’, form an anxious black comedy. From the renowned author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth is brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise. He is also black and a stereotype, invisible by definition. Invisible Man is a figure for the times – an existential hero, a version of Dostoevsky’s underground man, a confidence trickster. ‘I am an invisible man,’ the narration begins. It strangely mixed naturalism, expressionism and surrealism its mood was apocalyptic. In 1952 he published his first novel, Invisible Man, a book startling for its vision, rhetorical verve, and cunningly devised irony. Ellison spent years on the follow-up story, enduring a 66 fire that burned the initial manuscript, and tearing through writing and re-writing Juneteenth for the rest of his life. Ralph Ellison is one of the greatest modern African American (or, as he would probably have preferred, American Negro) novelists. Juneteenth is one small excerpt of Ellisons 2000+ manuscript after the Invisible Man.

Juneteenth ellison