Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) completed only one novel in his lifetime, but he was an accomplished essayist and letter writer. In a letter to Richard Wright, he wrote, "Letters come with difficulty." But "there was a time when I was more myself when writing a letter than at any other time." His voluminous correspondence is part memoir and part astute observations on literary and social issues. John F. Callahan, Ellison's literary executor, provides outstanding biographical overviews before each chapter.
Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man, won the National Book Award for Fiction (besting Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck's East of Eden). But it proved a hard act to follow. Over the next 42 years, Ellison worked on his second novel. "I've got a natural writer's block as big as the Ritz and as stubborn as a grease spot on a gabardine suit," he wrote to Saul Bellow in 1958. At the time of his death, the manuscript ran more than 2,000 pages. (Juneteenth was published posthumously in 1999, edited down to 368 pages. An expanded version, running 1,100 pages and retitled Three Days Before the Shooting..., was published in 2010.)
Ellison's most frequent correspondents include Langston Hughes, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, close friend Albert Murray and his wife, Fanny. Particularly fascinating are the letters he wrote to his wife in the late 1950s during his affair with a married woman. Ellison's letters are as stirring, vital and well-crafted as his published essays and fiction. This is a monumental and irresistible collection. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant