Three Days Before the Shooting . . ., Ralph Ellison
Three Days Before the Shooting . . ., Ralph Ellison
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Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

Author: Ralph Ellison, John F. Callahan, Adam Bradley

Narrator: Dominic Hoffman, Arthur Morey

Unabridged: 63 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/17/2018


Synopsis

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Meldrick on April 26, 2024

I’ve read this 1100-page behemoth twice. It’s a commitment. But despite it being unfinished, and in certain areas unpolished, Three Days Before the Shooting… is the greatest novel I have ever read. Now first off, that’s not the actual title to what Ralph Ellison’s second novel was going to be. I’ve......more

Goodreads review by Steve on January 28, 2022

My disappointment that Ellison could never finish this work is now all the greater. The opening of these characters: McIntyre, Hickman, Bliss . . . and the machinations beyond them and within them, have created such a reflective layering of challenges to identity and vision, to the word and the idea......more

Goodreads review by Schachtmant on June 10, 2019

I have read amazing authors from numerous countries and, yet, by far this extremely challenging book is the best novel I have ever read. Full stop.......more

Goodreads review by Purple on January 12, 2015

Failed attempt at grandness. I mean it probably could be great, but still reads and feels and looks like failure. Beware - it says three days, but it might take you three years to read it :)......more

Goodreads review by Jerome on August 29, 2023

Unfortunate this novel is rather lengthy and its unfinished form presents some challenges approaching and interfacing with, as taken as a whole it represents one of the most important American novels produced, the fruit of decades of laborious and careful effort, composed by one of this nation's mos......more


Quotes

“Less a conventional novel than the prose equivalent of a jazz solo, or a series of solos . . . some of [Ellison’s] finest prose.”—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

“Stirring . . . a deeply complex, even epic, story . . . rendered as majestically as you would expect from Ellison.”—Associated Press
 
“[This book is] more than a novel. It’s a literary experience.”—Ebony