Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

Ralph Ellison

Apr 2018 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Dominic Hoffman and Arthur Morey

About this audiobook

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, brimming 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.

About the author

RALPH ELLISON is the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952), 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. He is the literary executor of Ralph Ellison's estate. ADAM BRADLEY is an assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. He received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University.