The following guest post was written by Barbara Bair, curator of literature, culture and the arts in the Library’s Manuscript Division.
“Juneteenth . . . Is it still celebrated? . . .
Do we still? Why I should say we do.”
—Excerpt from Juneteenth draft manuscript by Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison labored long on his unfinished second novel, Juneteenth (1999), which was not published until after his 1994 death. The posthumous work was lovingly compiled from Ellison’s thousands of manuscript drafts and notes that are now preserved for researchers in the Ralph Ellison Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress by Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, with the active support of Ellison’s widow, Fanny McConnell Ellison.
Juneteenth as a novel was a long time coming. Its roots for Ellison lay in his work as a writer and folklore fieldworker with the U.S. Works Progress Administration Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, and the encouragement towards a literary life he received from Langston Hughes. It comes out of his many essays, his love of jazz and blues, his observations of the Black family and the Black church, the civil rights consciousness of the 1950s and 1960s, and his correspondence