Abstract

Ralph Ellison’s “Hickman Novel”—upon which Three Days Before the Shooting… is based—reveals that the Popular Front-era radicalism largely effaced from Invisible Man continued to fuel Ellison’s imagination. Although he had established his bona fides as a cold warrior in Invisible Man, Ellison retained certain leftist ideas and insights that both inspired and obstructed his attempts to pull together his second novel. His fidelity to a novelistic timeline anchored in the Jim Crow, the Depression, and the early civil rights movement would be disrupted by the felt need to draw in international antifascist activism during World War II.

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