[A] vastly ambitious informing allegory, an allegory made rich, as in Invisible Man, with the sensory details of which Ellison was such a master." -The New York Review of Books
"[A] stunning achievement. . . . Juneteenth is a tour de force of untutored eloquence. Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time
"Juneteenth . . . threatens to come as close as any since Huckleberry Finn to grabbing the ring of the Great American Novel." -Los Angeles Times
Eloquent, ardent, and worth the wait. . . . Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, Juneteenth, like Invisible Man, deserves to be read and reread by generations. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952), winner of the National Book Award and one of the most important and influential American novels of the twentieth century, as well as numerous essays and short stories. He died in New York City in 1994.
John F. Callahan is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He is the editor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and the Modern Library edition of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison and is literary executor of Ralph Ellison s estate.
Charles Johnson is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Washington. A MacArthur fellow, he is the author of twenty-five books, among them the novel Middle Passage, which received the 1990 National Book Award for fiction
