Forum Network

Editors John Callahan and Adam Bradley discuss Ralph Ellison's posthumously-published second novel Three Days Before the Shooting.

At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly two thousand pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, Invisible Man. He died without a literary executor, so the choice fell to his wife Fanny. She chose Ellison scholar and friend of the family John Callahan, who with student-turned-colleague Adam Bradley dove into the unfinished text.

Three Days Before the Shooting gathers together in one volume, for the first time, all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published. Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil, the story is a multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race-baiting US senator Adam Sunraider, who is being tended to by "Daddy" Hickman, the elderly black jazz musician turned preacher who raised the orphan Sunraider as a light-skinned black in rural Georgia. Presented in their unexpurgated, provisional state, the narrative sequences form a deeply poetic, moving, and profoundly entertaining book, brimming with humor and tension, composed in Ellison's jazz-inspired prose style and marked by his incomparable ear for vernacular speech.

Beyond its richly compelling narratives, Three Days Before the Shooting is perhaps most notable for its extraordinary insight into the creative process of one of this country's greatest writers. In various stages of composition and revision, its typescripts and computer files testify to Ellison's achievement and struggle with his material from the mid-1950s until his death 40 years later. Three Days Before the Shooting is an essential piece of Ralph Ellison's legacy, and its publication is to be welcomed as a major event for American arts and letters.