Ralph Ellison's Second Novel
Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952 and achieved instant and long-lasting success. The book won the National Book Award and became part of our literary canon. Ellison set to work on a second novel but it failed to appear in his lifetime. Critics have been puzzled by the lack of another novel. Now his literary executor & an assistant have supplied an answer to this vexing question. It was not writer's block which was the problem. Rather it was an accumulation of thousands of pages of manuscript which they are sorting through and plan to publish next spring (Juneteenth which was published in 1999 from a small section of the enormous second novel). The main problem that Ellison had was that he became enamored of using a computer to write the second novel and fell in love with the technology so much that the new work grew explosively.