Evidence of a true tragedy for literature. Ellison was a writer who grabbed hold of the muse like a musician and then applied his disciplined intellect and refined taste to it in draft after draft. He lost almost four hundred pages of creation in a fire and seemed never to recover from this blow to his own satisfaction. This is a huge pile of scattered beauty and thought that he could never quite get into final shape. It wasn't and isn't all here, but what IS here is wonderful. I haven't read the smaller "Juneteenth" so cannot comment on that distillation.

Think of Musil's unfinished book [The Man Without Qualities], the book we have in print that seems most similar to this one: a genius of world literature works for years, decades, on a task that may well have been impossible at the outset and dies at a ripe old age with it unfinished. As with that book, so with this one: We have what we have, and we should be thankful for it. Oh, what could have been! ( )

Read this before you read "Juneteenth." It might seem tedious to read similar passages over again, but it is fascinating to discover what Ellison changed about this manuscript as well as what the editors left out of the posthumously-published novel. ( )