From the author of the classic novelInvisible Man,Ralph Ellison’sJuneteenthisa powerful and brilliantly crafted tale that explores themes of identity, race, and ambition.

“[A] stunning achievement. . . . 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

The story follows Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator, whose life takes an unexpected turn when he calls for Alonzo Hickman, an old Black minister, to be by his side as he faces a mortal wound.As the two men intimately share their stories and memories, the true shape and substance of the past begin to emerge.

Here is Ellison, a virtuoso of American vernacularthe preachers hyperbole and the politicians rhetoric, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speechat the height of his powers, telling a moving, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century.

With an introduction and additional notes by John F. Callahan, who first compiledJuneteenthout of thousands of manuscript pages in 1999, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles R. Johnson.

Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived,Juneteenth, likeInvisible Man, deserves to be read and reread by generations. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution