Published afterEllison'sdeath, this follow-up toInvisible Manis a thunderous epic of memory, faith, loss & identity.'Words are your business, boy. Not just the Word. Words are everything''Tell me what happened while there's still time,' demands the dyingSenator Adam Sunraiderto the itinerate black baptist minister he callsDaddy Hickman. As a young orphan,Sunraiderwas taken in & raised byHickman, before reinventing himself as a racist politician. Now, as the two men confront the truth about their shared past in a final reckoning,Ellison'smasterly novel takes in memories of a southern childhood, the rhythms of jazz & gospel and the richness of theAfrican-Americanexperience.'Majestic' — Toni Morrison“Juneteenthis written with unmistakable Ellisonian zest, depth, & elegance. . . . The work holds together as a complete, aesthetically satisfying, & at times thrilling whole.”—The Atlantic“Impressionistic, jazzy, & Faulknerian, assembled from stories inside of stories, dreams, flights of memory, & bolts of rhetoric.”—New York“First-rate Ellison, exploring race & America in dreamlike prose.”—The Wall Street Journal“Ellison wrote better sentences than just about anybody. . . .Juneteenthis good the first time, better the second. His meanings slip & slide, they are associative, like American culture, where nothing is every quite what it seems, nor stays that way for long, & where absolutely nothing is purely black & white.”—Newsweek“For anyone who cares about American literature & the seemingly insolvable pain of race,Juneteenthis a must-read.”—USA Today“A stunning achievement . . .Juneteenthis 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 & fundamental.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time°°°Ralph Ellison (1914–1994)won theNational Book AwardforInvisible Man.