Ralph Ellison Books In Order

Novels

The Invisible Man (1952)
Juneteenth (1998)
Three Days Before the Shooting . . . (2010)

Collections

Flying Home (1996)
The Black Ball (2018)

Non fiction

Shadow and Act (1964)
Going to the Territory (1986)
Conversations with Ralph Ellison (1995)
Ralph Ellison: The Collected Essays (1995)
Trading Twelves (2000)
Living with Music (2001)
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (2003)
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison (2019)

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Ralph Ellison Books Overview

The Invisible Man

Ralph Elllison’s Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it. After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience of the hero’s high school days, moves quickly to the campus of a Southern Negro college and then to New York’s Harlem, where most of the action takes place. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity of the blindness of others. Invisible Man is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization; it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the Negro’s anomalous position in American society. From the Hardcover edition.

Juneteenth

Juneteenth, the Senator said, closing his eyes, his bandaged head resting beneath his hands. Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June, so they called it Juneteenth…
. In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a race baiting senator from a New England state, is mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. The Reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. Out of their conversation, and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne in silence for many long years, a story emerges. For this United States senator, once known as Bliss, was raised by Reverend Hickman in a religion and music steeped black community not unlike Ralph Ellison’s own childhood home. He was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and the Southwest. Together one last time, the two men retrace the course of their shared life in ‘an anguished attempt,’ Ellison once put it, ‘to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning.’ In the end the two men arrive at their most painful memories, memories that hold the key to understanding the mysteries of kinship and race that bind them, and to the senator’s confronting how deeply estranged he has become from his true identity. Juneteenth draws on the full richness of America’s black cultural heritage, from the dazzling range of vernacular sources in its language to the way its structure echoes the call and response pattern of the black church and the riffs and bass lines of jazz. It offers jubilant proof that whatever else it means to be a true American, it means to be ‘somehow black,’ as Ellison once wrote. For even as Senator Sunraider was bathed from birth in the deep and nourishing waters of African American folkways, so too are all Americans. That idea is the cause for which Ralph Ellison gave the last full measure of his devotion. At the time of his death, he was still expanding his novel in other directions, envisioning a grand, perhaps multivolume, story cycle. Always, in Ellison’s mind, the character Hickman and the story of Sunraider’s life from birth to death were the dramatic heart of the narrative. And so, with the aid of Ellison’s widow, Fanny, his literary executor, John Callahan, has edited this magnificent novel at the center of Ralph Ellison’s forty year work in progress Juneteenth, its author’s abiding testament to the country he so loved and to its many unfinished tasks.

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. Five years later, Random House published Juneteenth, drawn from the central narrative of Ellison’s unfinished epic. 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 gripping multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race baiting U.S. senator Adam Sunraider, who s 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, brim*ming with humor and tension, composed in Ellison s magical 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 forty years later. Three Days Before the Shooting…
is an essential, fascinating piece of Ralph Ellison s legacy, and its publication is to be welcomed as a major event for American arts and letters.

Flying Home

Written between 1937 and 1954 and now available in paperback for the first time, these thirteen stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison. Six of them remained unpublished during Ellison’s lifetime and were discovered among the author’s effects in a folder labeled ‘Early Stories.’ But they all bear the hallmarks the thematic reach, musically layered voices, and sheer ebullience that Ellison would bring to his classic Invisible Man. The tales in Flying Home range in setting from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlor, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War. By turns lyrical, scathing, touching, and transcendently wise, Flying Home and Other Stories is a historic volume, an extravagant last bequest from a giant of our literature.

Shadow and Act

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante esque landscape of Harlem ‘the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.’ Throughout, he gives us what amounts to an episodic autobiography that traces his formation as a writer as well as the genesis of Invisible Man. On every page, Ellison reveals his idiosyncratic and often contrarian brilliance, his insistence on refuting both black and white stereotypes of what an African American writer should say or be. The result is a book that continues to instruct, delight, and occasionally outrage readers thirty years after it was first published.

Going to the Territory

The work of one of the most formidable figures in American intellectual life.’ Washington Post Book WorldThe seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ralph Ellison was not only one of America’s most dazzlingly innovative novelists but perhaps also our most perceptive and iconoclastic commentator on matters of literature, culture, and race. In Going to the Territory, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, along with new perspectives on the music of Duke Ellington and the art of Romare Bearden. He analyzes the subversive quality of black laughter, the mythic underpinnings of his masterpiece Invisible Man, and the extent to which America’s national identity rests on the contributions of African Americans. Erudite, humane, and resounding with humor and common sense, the result is essential Ellison. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Ralph Ellison: The Collected Essays

In this collection of essays and interviews, Ellison writes of literature and folklore, jazz and black culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. This volume includes the critically acclaimed works Shadow and Act 1964 and Going to the Territory 1986.

Trading Twelves

This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion. The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians ‘trade twelves’ each improvising twelve bars of music around the same musical idea their lively dialog centers upon their respective writing, the jazz they both love so well, on travel, family, the work literary contemporaries including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and the challenge of racial inclusiveness that they wish to pose to America through their craft. Infused with warmth, humor, and great erudition, Trading Twelves offers a glimpse into literary history in the making and into a powerful and enduring friendship.

Living with Music

Ralph Ellison is, of course, most celebrated as the author of Invisible Man, but what many readers do not know is that this great writer’s first passion was music. An accomplished trumpeter, Ellison wrote widely and brilliantly on jazz for more than fifty years, immersing himself in the lives and works of America’sjazz, musicians, many of whom were his close friends. In Living with Music, jazz scholar Robert O’Meally has collected the very best of Ellison’s jazz pieces each one vibrant, insightful, and bursting with Ellison’s love of the music for a whole new audience. Included in the collection are profiles of famous musicians everyone will recognize, from Charlie Parker to Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus. There are well known essays, including the title piece ‘Living with Music,’ as well as selections from Ellison’s fiction, among them the sizzling ‘Cadillac Flambe.’ And there are meditations on jazz classics that will make even casual fans of the genre hear the music in a whole new way. With the publication of Living with Music, readers will see firsthand the resounding and profound influence that jazz and the writings of Ralph Ellison two art forms born of the same American vernacular have had on our culture.

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act 1964, hailed by Robert Penn Warren as a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race, and Going to the Territory 1986, an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. Ralph Ellison, wrote Stanley Crouch, reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.