And asked him if he would help me with this project in 1994. But i had wanted to write about ellisons work for a long time. And finally, in 1977, i wrote an essay on ellison, called the historical frequencies of ralph waldo ellison, and in this piece, i try to make the case that ellisons essays, and at that time, many others, some of them werent published at all, and many of the most compelling essays hadnt made it into shadow and act. Ralph says he used to say, society and morality in a novel, tell it like it is, baby, really unbelievably superb in original essays, were rejected for inclusion in shadow and act if you can believe it and i tracked these down and tried to make the case that invisible man his essays rather not only , provided a way to read invisible man but also more broadly provided a way to read American Literature as a continuing kind of engagement with the imperfect union of the declaration of independence, and the constitution and the sacred documents of abraham lincoln. Also, of the continuing struggle to perfect that union. I wrote the essay and i was pleased with it when it came out. We im always pleased with the things we write when theyre published. We get them and say yeah, i should have spent more time or maybe this one could have stayed in the box. But i was kind of pleased with it, and pleased enough to find ellisons address and send him the piece. A little note. Dear mr. Ellison, enclosed please find. That was the kind of texture of the note and rubbed my hands together. Thats that. Well, that wasnt that. About five weeks later, i got back a twopage, single spaced letter from ellison. He had read the piece and he liked it very much and he wanted to write me about it and talk about it. It was a warm letter, it was formal. Ralph and Fanny Ellison were warm people. He knew what manners was all about, manners had to do with both privacy and generosity. In any case, he end of the letter he said if youre ever in new york and have the time, mrs. Ellison and i would be glad to see you. Well, i restrained myself. I didnt go to the airport that night. I had the impulse to do it, i didnt do it. But i was in new york several months later and the ellisons invited me to come over and i wanted to tell a little bit about that meeting. It is so vivid in my mind. It was in may of 1978, and i remember taking a cab up to broadway and 150th really and Riverside Drive and passing a lilac, a flower stand, and seeing these great burgeoning bunches of lilacs. I asked the driver to wait. Got a bunch of lilacs. That was inspirational because the ellisons loved lilacs, they had lilacs in their summer place in the berkshires, and of course, mrs. Ellison beat ralph to the punch. Monthis the cruelest pulling lilacs out of the ground. I hadnt been thinking about that at all. In any case, they were warm and formal people. , esther ellison, missus ellison. So ralph ushered me into the into his study, and the study had it was all kind of one big old room, kitchen connected to the study, connected to the kind of little living room that had a magnificent view of the hudson. There was a very elegant italian marble table in the middle of the room, and there was a leather couch on either side of the table so ralph pointed out where the couch i was to sit and he sat across and we talked, 50 minutes or so, and you would never have known from this conversation that Ralph Ellison was a man, a jazz man of the vernacular from oklahoma, or that i was kind of a black irishman from up the line in new haven, connecticut. We talked as if they were inhabitants of one of the later novels of henry james, it was very pretentious. I glanced at my watch after a while, i was getting a little uncomfortable, if im honest with you, and why not be honest with you. Ralph at precisely five minutes to 5 00 this and came down on , the table, and he said, well, john, would you like a drink . I dont know about i needed a drink i think at that point, and but i was kind of dumber than invisible man. Thats kind of a hard thing to be, at least when we think about it, the invisible man in the early chapters. As i said, i said, why, yes, mister what . Sure, ralph, and then he did what he did so often and so fetchingly and charmingly, he lapsed into this oklahoma drawl and he said thats better, and he disappeared in the kitchen and emerged with a bottle of bourbon. I think it was jack daniels in a glass, and put it on his side of the table, and a bottle of irish. I think it was jameson in a glass and put it on mine. And we were off and became very, very Close Friends and i said, people over the years, long before ralph passed away, he said, well, what did they say about the reinhardt character in invisible man, john . What did he say about the second novel . And i tried as best i could to explain to him, that wasnt what our relationship was about. It was a friendship, and it was a friendship and i think adam perhaps will talk about this. Somehow, ralph has this pull on us all, whatever generation we were from. It was a very controlled paternal friendship. So you know, i wasnt there as a literally scholar at all. In any case, about 10 years later, after wed become very Close Friends, i was up visiting the ellisons in the berkshires, and ralph and i were taking a little walk and showing me his tractor. He loved gadgets, machines, and i said, ralph, id like to ask you something. Ive been wondering about it since we met. He said, why, yes . And i said, you know, ive always wondered about that damn Irish Whiskey that you brought out when we met. And he said, well, what, what are you wondering about, john . And i said ive always wondered what the hell you would have done with the Irish Whiskey if you hadnt liked me . And i thought that was pretty good, you know. I needed to draw a good card, but i thought i had a pair of jacks to at least open the poker game. Ralph looked at me, had these piercing brown eyes that would light up with hazel sparks, and so he just looked at me and shook his head and said, with more than a hint of disappointment, im afraid, for gods sake, john, i like Irish Whiskey too. You could not get Ralph Ellison with any of that kind of identity, politics, nonsense, you couldnt do it with those categories. Thats not where the man lives. He lived in another place. So we ask will Ralph Ellison and thats what i would say. Theres many other things to say as we go along. But he was a special kind of human being. He was a special kind of man. Ive never met his like. I havent met his like before or since. He had the most defiant imagination of anybody ive ever met, and mike spoke about this wonderful line of his. The true american is also somehow black, from ellisons Time Magazine essay in 1970 and i think i should say, this again ellison gave a whole new meaning to the term reversal. Theres such a thing as an ellisonan reversal. Time asked him to write an essay on what america would be like without blacks. So what does ellison do . He actually turns it inside out like so many of the jazz musicians, like davis and the others do with autumn leaves a sentimental tune and they make a gritty, harrowing piece of work. Well, ralph would do that over and over and over again. He would take ones expectations, he would take various american cliches and turn them inside out and bring us to a new place. Ok . Now, let me cut then to the novel and as mike pointed out, and you know, our adam and my editor, the Modern Library at random house, jonathan joll and i, we were all 3 very croup lust scrupulous about this and i hope that unlike juneteenth, those who read and comment on three days before the shooting will look at the title, because the title the subtitle of the book, is the unfinished second novel, and notice that first adjective. The unfinished second novel. That is in fact what we have published and we start from that. We make no apologies whatsoever about that. We try to turn that into a kind of opportunity. The opportunity that exists because of what ellison left behind, because he didnt finish the novel. An opportunity to do something that is rather special in american letters. About the a few words novel, about what we set out to do. It began aon with few days after ralph posey passing ralphs passing. We walked into the study and he was teeming with books and paper. The smokei could read from his unfinished cigars. His presence was very much there. Fanny said i hope you will help me. I want you to help me decide what to do with ralphs novel. And she gave me her very common sense, very acute bottom line on it. She said beginning, middle and end. Does it have a beginning, middle and end . That was the question that haunted me as i set to work on this novel and i thought for the longest time that i would find the fragments that would stitch together the various narratives, the typescripts and computer printouts. I looked and looked. And was some dirty socks i found ellisons earlier stories that fanny did not know existed. It was great. Put it into a book. Lected stories of Ralph Ellison. But i didnt find anything having to do with the second novel. It was all in fact down in the library of congress. The question was what to do and i wont rehearse simply say it seemed to me to be it was one of four principal narratives. It seemed to me the narrative that was closest to the bone of heme and the action of the novel. The relationship between bliss, little boy growing up to be senator adamss son later and reverend alonzo hickman, jazz man turned preacher. But it was very telescoped as the action took place after the assassination, when he calls hickman to come to his bedside in the hospital where he is fatally wounded and i knew from his notes that allison always ellison always intended to end the novel with the death of sun rader. On that basis, talking with mrs. Ellison as well, i concluded the best thing to do for ellisons readers was to present the book has juneteenth, a fragment. A narrative that was also a fragment. There was juneteenth. It was a close run decision. These decisions about posthumous work are always close run decisions. There are pros and cons and we learned that. I think there have been a number of posthumous additions published lately or in the works. So i said i will do that and we had been working some on all of these manuscripts and narratives, and particularly we are puzzling over the computer the printouts and adam did lot of special and important work with the computers, the disks and research into what kind of computers ellison had and when he bought them and what the capacities were and so on. What i said and i did at times regret saying this in print, basically promising and committing to bringing out it another edition of not the totality, there too many variants of too many episodes but bringing out the other narratives in a scholarly edition. That is what adam and i set out to do and that is what 3 days before the shooting is. It has six narrative is. Part i has book ii, a manuscript which was part of juneteenth but ellison had not put it into a book ii. Those are the typescript. That is part i. Part ii consists of two principal narratives from computer printouts. Hickman in washington in washington, d. C. That is where the focus is. We put that on there. Secondly hickman in georgia and oklahoma and then there is a very curious piece of work thac that he did on the computer and it was the last thing we found dated december 30, 1993. The actual last date of the composition. He was still an work on the novel in the next few months but there is no date. We cant date anything that precisely. So this is called mcintyre and it is a kind of a variant of chapter 12 of book one, the typescript of a book that he wrote many years ago. There it is. That is what this book consists of and also a selection of the notes. It consists of all eight of the excerpts from the second novel which he published during his lifetime. It consists of 10 or 12 variants of the opening of hickman in washington, d. C. The beginning of the novel and maybe adam will talk about this a little bit, so it shows the kind of compulsion ellison brought to this work and a compulsion to revise it and the tendency toward protectionism perfectionism which is both a blessing and a curse for ralph that he had as well. And a couple shorter drafts of the opening of book ii and then we have a general a couple of introductions, editorss introductions and editorss notes. Our decision was to let this book speak for itself. It is really not edited. We had some go arounds on this matter with our good publisher about copy editing but the copy editor who went about the task almost as if a living person said here is my book, i want the best book i can have so the copy editor set to work correcting grammar and style. Began three sentences in a row with and, we had to make all kinds of notations like a cadence. Leave it alone. We want the reader to choose. We want the reader to have a kind of conversation with these manuscripts and maybe if the reader is interested and attentive enough begin to bring to this unfinished novel his or her own sense about what ending might have been appropriate. And i want to close by two things. Saying something about what i think the providence, the thematic providence of this novel is, and then Say Something about adam and turn it over to adam. Invisible man is a novel of segregation in america. It comes out in 1952, and the principal is prophetic. Theres a foretelling. Ellison believed literature should engage in foretelling. Theres foretelling of the Civil Rights Movement of the end of the novel clearly is in an america still governed by plessey versus ferguson, separate but equal. This novel is the moment of the 1954, 1955. Novel is the brown vs. Board decision of 1954. I want to read a letter that ellison wrote right after he heard the decision come down. It is remarkable letter. It gets at what he is up to in this novel. His theme of the invasion of identity and its cost and its danger. So now the court has found in our favor and recognized our human psychological complexity and citizenship and another battle of the civil war has been won. The rest is up to us and i am very glad. The decision came when i was reading a stillness at appomattox and a study of the Negro Freedman and it made a heightening of emotion and telescoping of perspective, yes and a sense of the problems that , lie ahead that left me what d. Weteye i can see the whole room stretched out and all got mixed up with this book i am trying to write and left me twisted with joy and a sense of inadequacy. Why did i have to be a writer during a time when events sneer openly at your efforts, the fine define consciousness and form . Well so now the judges found , negros must be individuals and that is hopeful and good. What a Wonderful World of possibilities are unfolded for the children. For me theres still the problem of making meaning out of the past and i am lucky are described bledsoe before he was checked out. Now on writing about the invasion of identity which is another characteristic american problem which must be about to change. I hope so. It is giving me enough trouble. Anyway here is to integration, the only integration that counts, that of the personality. That letter to me is the best, most profound and that can be given to why Ralph Ellison did not finish this work. I am so proud to be here with adam, to introduce him, to have actually done this book to completion and to have been adams teacher and friend, colleague, collaborator over the years. Relationship and to say that i think one of the things about collaboration is have to keep each other honest or you dont have a collaboration and how can i agree . It requires a certain antagonistic cooperation. You kind of bump up against each other and along way the bruises become a rainbow maybe if you can handle that metaphor. In any case, it seems to me that the book like the book what we managed to do, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and certainly the best thing i can say is my heart is full being here with this book being published, here with adam and i would say without adam the book wouldnt exist. Adam was indispensable all the way through to this book so thank you and congratulations. [applause] john stall on my best lines so i have to give you my secondbest. Lets hope that is good enough. I first met Ralph Ellison when i was 19yearsold and he had already passed away. He hated ghost stories so that is not what this is. I met him as many of you did on the page. I met him in John Callahans africanAmerican Literature course, reading invisible man with a host of other great works of fiction but there was something about that novelette that novel that caught my attention. Something about it that spoke to me of my own story. Elson once said of invisible man that it is my novel but invisible mans memoir, the idea of a dual existence took on another existence, as i read it, i was reading what i thought was my own experience as a biracial kid growing up in utah without the black side of my community, finding myself more as an American Life to afford my own identity of parts that were somehow still missing but still emerging. So there was a moment in particular when he appeared to me, if you will. It was on the campus of lewis and Clark College which both of these men know quite well. Very close to president minis office where we requisitioned the entire space, the last table t table and spread out all the fragments of ellisons novel as it was emerging on the computer. John did something that looking back now i think what were you thinking . He gave me, a 19yearold sophomore the option to go up there and look at this material , sometimes being the third or fourth person who would ever seen it. Ellison, ellisons wife, john and finally me. Astounding thing to go from spanish class to reading a ellisons unpublished second novel. Mythic almost in its proportion. An astounding thing to have this opportunity. And i was ready for it because i was and ellison groupie by that point. I had read invisible man and he was my god. My guy. He was helping me to understand myself. He was helping me to understand literature. I was ready to be blown away. But then i saw something i never would have imagined from an author of this stature, something that forever changed the way that i would look at fiction both from the perspective of a teacher that i have become, the writer i have become and editor of this volume three days before the shooting. The thing that i saw was a typo. This may seem like a small sort of thing to notice but as i flipped through more pages i kept seeing additional moments like that. Even i as a 19yearold kid could have the audacity to say i could write a better sense than that sentence than that. I know how i could fix that sentence. I think maybe if he had done this or that slightly differently. Believe me i was feeling guilty , even thinking this stuff. It is downright biblical. Story, seeing the nakedness in that way. And he was naked. There was something naked about these moments late in ellisons life as he is moving from his 70s, moving towards his 80s, still working on the same book he had started in the 1950s. But i saw something past those typos and rough sentences. I saw the process of evolution. A process of progression from draft to draft that would lead to moments of brilliance, moments of ellison at his highest powers and moments of eloquence that were moving and taught me something about literature. It is not a piece of perfection but rather a matter of progress and process. Good writing is rewriting. That is a cliche for a reason. It came to life for the first time in a way that i understood it much more than i did in my fiction 101 class. It made sense because i sought through ellison himself. It is in this spirit that we come to understand how to approach the editing of this manuscript. Something that ellison began even before he finished writing invisible man, something he continued through the decades as he lived his life. Something thats on not only the Civilrights Movement but the end, vietnam, womens liberation, black power, the digital age on into the clinton , administration. This is the arc of American History, the second half of the 20th century. The story did not end there. The story pushed forward into johns in myinto life. It made me become a professor instead of a lawyer like i should have been. It made me become a writer and brought us to the position of trying to figure out how to bring it to you. How could we make this into something you would want to read. We knew we had been living with this novel for so long and all of its forms. We knew why we were passionate about it but part of the passion came in the fact of being a absorbed in it and living it for so many lea years. How do we give that impression to a reader who comes to to a bookstore like this and picks up a copy . This isnt a book you pick up on done innd have time for sunday brunch. It requires an investment on part of the reader. It requires active participation in the creation of fiction. It is that kind of book. It,e not everyone is up to those who try will feel something we have felt. And intimacy with the literary master. A look into the craft of fiction but more than that, it is more than a scholarly edition that we intended it to be. It is really a readers addition that is meant as all of ellisons fiction was meant to be, a work of fiction for every one. This is a book that ends with this line. And it is this which frightens me. Who knows what on the lower frequencies i speak for you. What kind of author would ellison be if he stopped with that vision . That radical idea of speaking for you, a democratic idea. Rooted in the very concept of the democratic process. This is a democratic book that requires participation and even activism. It rewards you. It gives you this glimpse that it gives into the writer and the man and into American Literature in the 20 century and leading to the 21st. I will stop there. [applause] thank you very much. You would have been a formidable lawyer but i am glad you chose our profession. Thank you. I will do one more thing. I will ask each of these remarkable editors to choose a brief passage from this book, read it and then we will elicit from all of your comments and questions. Do you have something you could read . I read the letter of ralphs from 1954 and suggesting what he was up to in this book to stand on the cusp of integration and project forward. One of the most moving and brilliant of his projections of this sort comes in book ii in the form of a hallucination by the wounded and dying senator adam in keeping with adams comments about the readers responsibility and the responsibility of participation, i am going to resist the impulse to say thing. Thing about this passage and i will put it where it ought to be, in your hand, and your minds. And the hallucination, he is delirious and he hallucinates that the world is distorted and soon after this passage three black men, each in wonderful ellison idiom is speaking in different black patois. You get a guy from jamaica, and urban and southern black man and each, they are not called you can tell by the way they speak, the author, the speaker changes and just before this the senator, utterly disoriented, spins into this kind of delirious reverie. So, the senator thought, it will come. They are beginning to stir. His old fighters he warned, watch hands, feet and head. Yes they are moving out into the , open and things are beginning to heave and the backwash is beginning. But hickman, here . Unlikely. Though the knows who it was who came . Nine owls have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk. So soon they will come marching out of the woodpile and the woodwork, soar ahead right up close. One shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds welcome for lessons unlearned but studying war once more. [applause] it is a big book. There are so many places to go to find something to read. I think what i want to do is read you something from the later years of ellisons rating. Writing. He turned to the laptop computer, one of the earliest Laptop Computers ever in 1980 or 1981. It weighed 25 pounds. It had that fourinch green screen monitor. Yet somehow he eeked out some really beautiful prose from this. He continued to right through the computer through the 1980s and in the 1990s until as john mentioned the weeks and months before his death. What we have here is a bit of the old and a bit of the new. Often it seems to our best judgment that what he did was take some drafts that he had begun before, stuck them by his computer and started playing maybe typing verbatim certain with them. Maybe typing verbatim certain parts of what he had written years before were taking off on all sorts of different risks. One of the most fascinating things that he does is to take 7 pages or so of the prologue to the typescripts that he wrote in the 1970s and what he dispatches and even less than that, maybe a paragraph and a half. They both began with that line 3 days before the shooting which hickman and his parishioners in washington, d. C. Then it cuts to them going to the Senate Office building trying to find adam sunraider. What ellison is doing in later years is take the same turn, seven pages or less and makes it 350 pages. This comes from that portion. What i am going to read you is a portion in which after they leave the airport, hickman, this jazzman who turned preacher and has been surrogate father to a young boy who goes off even though he is raised by black folks to live his life guarding starting across the color line and finally emerging as this racist new england senator and his assassination is the central action of the novel. So they have been stopped and the Police DiscoverSomething Interesting in the case where hickman is carrying and that is where i will give it to you. What is this thing you have with it . The white man said as he fingered around a rubber object. That is a matter of the user and how he employees it. To a stick it is a tool for section. Section . This is a toilet plunger. That is right. But not on a bandstand. So what is it doing here . That, hickman said as he sees the opportunity for striking back at the captain, is because of a miracle. A what . That is right. A miracle which occurred long ago during a big public dance in new orleans. And it came to pass after one of the musicians made the mistake of misplacing his new. His mute. The musician was terribly upsetting because he was famous for the boys like effects which it provided. The idea of disappointing his listeners became so disturbing that it sent him speeding on a trip to the mens room. But he was still upset. When he saw one of those standing beside him, a miracle took place. Weiait. That is right, but only after the musician underwent a fierce struggle. He couldnt figure what he was doing with such a thing but being desperate to maintain his fine reputation and artistic standards he removed the rubber cup from his wooden stick and washed it. Then still puzzled by a sudden , urge to handle something so it, stuck it in his pocket and returned to the bandstand. But it wasnt until he pressed its flexible end to the belt of bell of his horn that he began to understand. That he began to understand just why his hand had moved so much faster in the mens room than his mind was able but when the time came to improvise one of his favorite tunes he rose with his horn in one hand and the toilet plunger in the other. He started to sweat and tremble and no wonder because when folks on the dance floor saw him they began laughing so hard that he felt like a fool but being a professional he bowed and signaled the drummer to accelerate the rhythm and come to his aide and once he got going and muting his horn with that plunger the sound it produced was so thrilling that he brought down the house. [applause] i think Ralph Ellison is in very good hands and i hope you agree with me on that one. It is time to turn this into a graduate seminar. At least another graduate an undergraduate seminar. Who here has the question to put in these . Use the mic. I just wanted to make a comment that from your reading i just thought that was a wonderful metaphor for the terror of creation. Any artist who creates in any medium reaches that point of unknown. Of course he has no choice. He does what he needs to do. I understand what he meant, i believe. John and i seemed we had a toilet plunger in our hand at some point thinking how are we going to find a form that will make this something that readers will find accessible, that readers will find their way through. We think we have done it but the moment he describes captors captures something about the artistic temperament, the daring needed to create art. It is all there and it is just one small moment in the novel. If i could add a brief addendum to that, it shows something of how ellison moved. As a craftsman. This is a kind of it is a pause in the action and a commentary on the action. Exposition, yet there is drama of this musicians story. Yea. Mic. Is a live yeah. Clarification. I did not read juneteenth because i was waiting. I was waiting. For this. Callahan, when you laid out what is contained in thattext, is the narrative comprised juneteenth interwoven or is that a narrative apart . Latter. The juneteenth consists of the prologue to book one, and then buto up to about see. The first five sixths of book ii, i inserted into that to second to last, the penultimate chapter. Every word in juneteenth is in howst about 10 heavily selfedited are the manuscript pages . Own scribblings or is it as is with everything he had laid out . Thats a great question. Ellison was a tinkerer by trade. He worked over his pages with such meticulous care. One of the things we did was not simply to identify the latest manuscripts for a given period of time, although we certainly did that but we go to the library of congress and there inundations on the latest version. On the computer desk he would add it on screen and then rename the file and have all these variants of the same basic episodes, like the episode of us here today. From your perspective, from mine, third person perspective, all these different angles. The next thing he would do is printed out and work over that latest draft. We often found places where that work as well. It stretches all the way back to when he was an apprentice author working his trade in the 1930s. He liked to have his hands in pencil, nota pen or just the typing. Even into the 80s and 90s he still followed that practice. Some of the instinct is maddening to an editor. Iost difficult part wish i had the toilet plunger. In parts of book ii where there was an original typescript, he went over and made inundations, mostly in pencil on this original typescript. Laboriously figured that out. Magnifying glasses and the rest of it. As adams suggested he wrote in great haste. He revised and penciled in in great haste. I cant talk because my own handwriting but he was very hard to read some of this and sort it. You sorted that and felt pretty good. I better check the carbon of this manuscript. Sure enough the Worst Nightmare was true. Made different changes in pencil on the carbon. There was no date. To this day i dont have a really good surmise that i trust in the slightest about which one was before the other. What i tried to do is to say we will incorporate both if all possible. Sometimes it had to be a choice. It was a thicket. It was the briar patch. Ellison ran away into the briar patch and i had to follow him. And i got some printer marks on my arm. R marks on my arm. I wasnt born and bred in the editorial, had to inquire it. I know that the invisible man we are familiar with is heavily edited. The editor did a lot to it. Is there any way we could see this in the future as a 200 page version . Does it lend itself to that . I am not sure with respect to invisible man. How is invisible man heavily edited . When he submitted it didnt it have a lot more pages . Hi got it. There is a penultimate version of invisible man from which ellison and his editor cut 200 pages. But make no mistake. Ellison made those cuts. Adam perhaps will want to talk about that. His forthcoming book on ellison is about that. I will leave it to you to talk about that. Ellison did all of it. Nobody imposed it on him. Theres so much in there that i actually had to write a separate book to cover this. Ralph ellison in progress is coming out in may. I looked at the invisible man typescripts to see what kind of book it would be had we had these other pages. It is it will not a better book but it is a different book. For instance, invisible man is married at least in one of the iterations of the novel. He is married to a white woman, a member of the brotherhood. Ellison cut out in various publicationng up to a host of characters some of which remain in shadow form in the published novel. I am not sure whether three days will lend itself to the kind of same process of mastering the form. In part because invisible man is a rather enclosed book. We have a prologue and epilogue and a series of scenes in between. One voice though. You can always go back to that voice and that first person the , solidity of that. This is a book that is teeming with voices. Black, white, young, old, all sorts of things going on. He didnt have the same place to go to keep it on the line. He had to look for other elements of his craft to bring it together. The fact that he didnt do that is the reason he didnt have a book published last time. Published in his lifetime. All the speculation we have about the psychology of ellison and what pressures he was under , whatever other things. ,we have literary evidence to show he was still he still had some anymore questions to answer on the matter of form and the shape of the book. Yeah, it wouldve been a big book regardless. I dont know if it would have been this big but it would have been big. Can i ask do you want to address the issue of the house fire . This is an example of history. In actuality of an event becoming somewhat of a myth. Fortunately we have ellisons letters in the fire in november a few days before thanksgiving in 1967. Ellison writes letters, two letters within ten or 12 days of the fire in which he grits his teeth and pulls up his socks and says we have had a tragedy. Not only do we lose our house, our summer home but i lost a summers worth of revisions. We know how much material he had but summers were for revisions. It was excruciating and terrible pain for ralph because he was on the case. He was hoping to finish it. There was a commitment to deliver the manuscript to random house. They kept reassuring his contact and they paid him a substantial advance, 50,000 i think. So he was pushing to get it done so he could deliver it by the next summer or late spring. Bang. Revisions gone. But a summers worth of revision is a lot different from losing the entire manuscript or even the entire book. My surmise is he was hot on the trail of trying to bring book ii to a conclusion and he lost that. It is a gas. It is a conjecture. The next thing he did publish in 1969 so he would have gotten it to the editors of the magazine within six or seven month of the fire, something called something called night talk. A brilliant verse within book ii and also in juneteenth. That was to reassure himself and the world i am on it. I am on it. Later ralph and others talk about the fire as if it destroyed most of the book and he had to put it together again and it was poignant in the last interview on the occasion of his birthday in 1994, he was turning 80. He talked about the fire. It is interesting because he talked about the fire as if it had been absolutely devastating and really crippling in every way especially in terms of what , had lost in terms of the manuscript. But then he goes on to say i am working everyday and there will be something very soon. What did invisible man say about ambivalence . The last question, i am going to put you on the spot. Juneteenth. This is a book filled with wonderful narratives, variations. Very strong in the book what you published as juneteenth. Would Ralph Ellison have been well served to do that himself . Is that the book that you think was begging to be freed . And secondly, do you have any second thoughts about having done it . Let me start with the second part of the question. Do i have second thoughts . Sure. Would i have done it again . Yes. It was always a close run thing. It was a choice. The best choice would have been defined that ralph lost his memory and he was in hoboken and we could go get him back to Riverside Drive, set up and say here we go. We almost lost you and you have to do that second novel now. Or the holy ghost would have come down and we go to the old testament. I dont want to kid but humor is sometimes the best offense defense against grief. It was deep grief of Ralph Ellison that he didnt finish this book and the more i work with it, i grieve over what he i myself believe that juneteenth in terms of the writing and in terms of the depth and allusion to history. A wonderful phrase a woman at the smithsonian brought to our discussion last night talking about the purpose for the center for african emerging history. Theme through an African American lens. Henry louis gates called the book of blackness a book of blackness. Juneteenth stands and it ought to stand and i feel much better about it because it is alongside this and you all can choose. Doesnt take us into a new land of avatar, people will still be reading books and it will all thank you. One more. I wanted to say i heard the interview on the radio today. In talking about how this is a book people may dip in and out of and he was working on this , its anotherears thing to bring to our attention specifically but having people through the book especially his identity as a jazz musician because i think often people get hung up on what the final document was. It is so refreshing to see the amazing intend that went into 40 years of work and even though will grieve about it, it never came out until now so thank you very much for doing that. My question is from what you , from the familial sense, if you could talk more about the quote he used before you use before saying every two american is somehow black, how he would if someone like the characters in this book were to oppose him racially and say ridiculous stuff, how would he explain that to us, to people during more divided time or now . He would talk about culture. Over andeferred to it over again. Blackness has to do with culture for ralph. , the wholeblues africanamerican tradition of being able to take a punch of whatever sort, it may be and maybe reel from it, but still down and you are not if you are not knocked down, put your dukes up, keep the faith. All these things we associate. We talked about slavery and , people used to say how slavery had dehumanized black folks. Ellison said the hell it did. People who can experience all of what was done, all of the humiliation, the pain , the subjugation and all of the rest and rise up and create the oral tradition of the sermons, the stories, the blues, later on, jazz. And hang together as a people, this is one of the heroic achievements of human history. He believed that. To cut us all into the deal if we would just respond and participate. Its one of the most profound statements about american identity. Ideal, a participatory another part of black tradition we see his call and response, the back and forth. Ellison offers that call out to us in his fiction. And thisible man longawaited second novel. It embodies very ideals of the phrase the john mentioned from his article in 1970. It embodies it quite literally in a single character. Bliss later known as son rader, a child born of indeterminate race was his phrase. Freighted this character with that kind of significance of embodying america and the promise of a multiracial american democracy. This is the book that i think belongs best in the 21st century. It belongs best in our present moment. Ofthe era of obama and all this talk about post reishi a la d. If you want to understand the true meaning of what it means to live in a country like ours and you want to see the complexity idea behind post reishi a la d look to post raciality. This is a great year for adam bradley, not only this book, but he will soon publish with yale press ellison in progress. In addition he is working on another book. It doesnt have a title yet. This is a great year for john callahan. We have this volume in front of us, he has finished and published to great acclaim his first novel. He is about to finish i think the second. I wont name it. Not sure yet. No pressure, john. [laughter] i conclude by saying this is a great year for Ralph Ellison. We thank his editors for making that possible. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] American History tv products are available at the cspan online store. See whats new for American History tv and check out all of the cspan products. Next on the civil war, Virginia Tech professor paul quigley talks about Jefferson Davis political opponents in the south, including many governors who resented that he prioritized the confederacy over the states. This talk was part of a conference hosted by shenandoah universitys civil board input civil war institute. Our next and final speaker comes from an institution that, as i alluded to is very near and dear to my heart Virginia Tech. , dr. Paul quigley is the director of the Virginia Center for civil war studies and