Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison
Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison
List: $24.00 | Sale: $16.80
Club: $12.00

Juneteenth

Author: Ralph Ellison

Narrator: Joe Morton

Unabridged: 14 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/06/2011


Synopsis

From the author of bestselling Invisible Man—the classic novel of African-American experience—this long-awaited second novel tells an evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century. Brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise, Juneteenth is the work of an American master.

"Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss's history encompasses the joys of young southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker, lovemaking in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals? 

Here is the master of American vernacular at the height of his powers, evoking the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech.

"An extraordinary book, a work of staggering virtuosity. With its publication, a giant world of literature has just grown twice as tall." —Newsday

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on March 20, 2025

this book is one of the great editorial achievements: 2,000 pages of incomplete and incohesive content winnowed down into one comparatively slim, comparatively consistent book. but compared to the invisible man, one of the great writing achievements...i mean. how do you follow that up. the various art......more

Goodreads review by MJ on June 30, 2013

My rule with unfinished or abandoned novels is to leave them festering lonesome on shelves as embarrassing reminders of a writer’s all-too-human faffiness—Gogol’s Dead Souls II serving as the ur-example of what happens when an author fails to follow up a masterpiece and loses his sanity and reputati......more

Goodreads review by Paul on June 18, 2021

Juneteenth, the holiday that celebrates the true and final end of slavery in the United States, provides the title and the thematic centerpiece for Ralph Ellison’s second and final novel – a brilliant affirmation of human community, and a work that many of the admirers of this great American writer......more

Goodreads review by Ben on January 29, 2012

I don't listen to country music so forgive my inability to properly reference this song; a song I abhor. I have seen the music video though. The guitar-slinging singer hops out of his Chevy pickup wearing a baseball cap and mechanics shirt singing about all the characteristics of a "real" American.......more

Goodreads review by Rachel on November 18, 2008

Wow. One reading while breastfeeding is not going to cut it with this book. Talk about layers. I feel the need to read lots of scholarship about this book, but not right now. Does it bother you when you read a book that describes someone as a "great" something but gives no evidence of their being "gre......more


Quotes

"[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