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  • Published: 18 July 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241215005
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $22.99

Juneteenth




A jazz novel, a sermon and a song of praise to the richness of African-American experience

From Ralph Ellison - author of the classic novel, Invisible Man - the long-awaited follow up. Here is 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.

'Tell me what happened while there's still time,' demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss's history encompasses the joys of young southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker, lovemaking in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals? Brilliantly crafted, moving, wise, Juneteenth is the work of an American master.

  • Published: 18 July 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241215005
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $22.99

About the authors

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after the preacher-philosopher Emerson, was born in Oklahoma in 1914. His father died when he was three years old and he was brought up by his mother who worked as a domestic help in white households in order to support herself and her two sons. At the age of nineteen he won a scholarship to study music at the Booker T. Washington Tuskegee Institute. In 1936 he went to New York and there met the black writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. He started contributing to the Federal Writers' Project, set up as part of Roosevelt's New Deal, and soon his short stories and articles began to appear in magazines and journals.

In 1943 he joined the United States Merchant Marines returning to New York after the war. Awarded a Rosenwald fellowship he was able to concentrate on his writing and, seven years after starting it, his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952) was published. Immediately recognized as a classic in its own time, and described as a 'touchstone of the 1950s', it won the American National Book Award and established Ellison as one of the major figures of twentieth-century fiction. He also published two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), but his second novel, which he worked on for over four decades and repeatedly declared to be 'virtually finished', never appeared. Flying Home and Other Stories (Penguin 1996) is a collection of both published and previously unpublished short stories.

Ellison was highly regarded by both the literary and academic worlds. He was Fellow of the American Academy in Rome from 1955 to 1957 and on his return held several visiting professorships; latterly being Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at New York University. He received the United States Medal of Freedom in 1969, became Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1970, and received the National Medal of Arts in 1985. Ralph Ellison died in 1994, survived by his wife of forty-eight years. In his obituary, the Independent declared him 'a great gentleman, indeed a noble man, and the remarkable mythologising author of ... the great American Negro novel'.

John Callahan

John Callahan is a quadriplegic who was paralyzed in an
auto accident in 1972, since then he has became a famous
cartoonist. He has been profiled on 60 Minutes and NPR's
Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He lives in Portland, Oregon,
where Callahan can been seen buzzing around his
neighborhood in his wheelchair.