In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Philip Roth’s Invisible Man I should like to conclude ...with the image of his hero that Ralph Ellison presents at the end of Invisible Man. For here too the hero is left with the simple stark fact of himself.He is as alone as a man can be.Not that he hasn’t gone out into the world; he has gone out into it, and out into it, and out into it—but at the end he chooses to go underground, to live there and to wait. And it does not seem to him a cause for celebration either. His intellectual position was virtually identical to mine, but he was presenting it as a black American, instructing through the examples drawn from Invisible Man. Philip Roth When Ralph Ellison died in 1994,his passing was met with a mixture of acclaim and regret. Ellison’s importance as a novelist and cultural critic was widely acknowledged, but amid this celebration of his achievement as one of the major figures of American literature there ran an undercurrent of doubt. Since at least the publication of Shadow and Act in 1964, Ellison’s public appearances both in print and on the podium provoked his audience to wonder when he might produce his next novel. In 1951, a few months before Invisible Man was to be published, he was writing a friend, “So I’m trying to get going on my next book before this one is finished, then if it’s a dud I’ll be too busy to worry about it” (Trading 21). By 1963, Ellison admitted in print that he had been “remiss and vulnerable” to “demands” that he “publish more novels” (Collected 188). To his dying day, though, he assured questioners that he was working on one and hoped to be finished soon. With his death the obvious question emerged again with a sense of finality that threatened to overpower the work he did accomplish: why did Ellison, arguably the most gifted writer and critic of his generation, not publish another novel? Does his failure to produce another novel, despite his continual assurances that more fiction was under way and soon to be seen, brand him a failure? What in fact is Ellison’s legacy? 42 Philip Roth’s Invisible Man 43 In 2010,sixteen years after his death,and nearly sixty years after he began his second novel, his work-in-progress was published by his literary executors , John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley, as Three Days before the Shooting . This long, unfinished work amplifies on the tantalizing draft earlier published as Juneteenth and in many ways enriches our understanding of Ellison as a writer of genius. In places, the second novel reads as if Ellison were drafting versions of his essays that consistently argued for a pluralistic American culture. Yet at the heart of the book is the assassination of a racist “white” senator by his “black” son. This son, who is “light” like his father but who resents his “white” coloring, vows, “If I ever find the son of a bitch who gave me this color I’ll kill him!” (Three 759). His attempted act of murder arguably repays the Senator for betraying the black community that had raised him. Whether this is an act of justice or of race madness is a question left open. This unfinished book, however, the longest unsolved mystery of American letters,reveals an Ellison passionately confronting the questions raised by the Civil Rights era. Had he published a version of it in his lifetime—say, by 1970, as he apparently thought of doing—his career might have been seen differently.He might have been less vulnerable to the charges made against him by some blacks who were angry that he was not more bluntly oppositional in his politics. Had he published a version of his second novel, his most prominent biographer could not have equated his failure to finish it with his seeming alienation from other black intellectuals (though readers would have been free to say it diminished the achievement of Invisible Man). Almost certainly, had he published his novel, he would not be the isolated figure of African American letters that he became. Certainly , he would not be known as the “classic” black American author who wrote “only” one novel. He also would not be Ralph Ellison. Ellison’s gifts as an intellectual and as an artist were such that the word “genius” seems appropriate to describe them...

Share