page manuscript which was part of juneteenth but ellison had not put it into a book ii. those are the typescript. that is part i. part ii consists of two principal narratives from computer printouts. in washington d.c. we put that on and secondly hickman in georgia and oklahoma and then there is a very curious piece of work thatçç he did on the comr and it was the last thing we found dated december 30th, 1993. the actual last date of the composition. he had done work on the novel in the next few months that there is -- we can't date anything

that precisely. so this is called mcintyre and it is a kind of a variant of chapter 12 of book one, the typescript that he wrote many years ago. that is what this book consists of and also a selection of the lesson's notes and all eight of the excerpts from the second novel which he published during his lifetime, it consists of 10 or 12 variants of the opening of hickman in washington d.c. the beginning of the novel and maybe adam will talk about this a little bit so it shows the kind of compulsion allison brought to this work and a compulsion to revise it and the tendency toward protectionism which was a blessing and curse to ralph that

he had as well and a couple shorter drafts of the opening of book ii and then we have a general -- a couple of introductions, editors's introductions and editors's notes and our decision was to let this book speaks for itself. it is really not edited. we had some go arounds on this matter with our good publisher about copy editing but the copy editor who went about the task almost as if a living person said here is my book, i want the best book i can have so the copy editor set to work correcting grammar and style, 3 sentences with and, we had to make all kinds of notations like a cadence.

leave it alone. we want the reader to choose. we want the reader to have a conversation with these manuscripts and maybe if the reader is interested and attentive enough begin to bring to this unfinished novel his or her own sense about what ending might have been appropriate. and i want to close by two things. the problem, the thematic providence of this novel, and something about adam and turn it over to adam. it is a novel of segregation in america. comes out in 52, the principle is prophetic. there's a foretelling. ellison believed literature shooting gauge in foretelling. there's foretelling of the civil-rights movement of the end

of the novel clearly is in an america still governedçç by plessey versus ferguson, separate but equal. the moment of the novel is the brown vs. board decision of 1954. i want to read a letter that ellison wrote right after he heard the decision come down. it is remarkable letter. it gets at what he is up to in this novel. his theme, the invasion of identity and its cost and its danger. so now the court has found in our favor and recognized our human psychological complexity and citizenship and another battle of the civil war has been won. the rest is up to us and i am very glad. the decision came when i was

reading a stillness at appomattox and a study of the negro freedman and it made a heightening of perspective and a sense of the problems that lie ahead that left me what i'd. i can see the whole room stretched out and all got mixed up with this book i am trying to right and left me twisted with julianne and a sense of inadequacy. why did i have to be a writer during a time when events sneer openly at your efforts, the fine consciousness and form? so now the judges found negro's must be individuals and that is hopeful and good. would wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children. for me there's still the problem of making meaning out of the past and i am lucky are

described bledsoe before he was checked out. now on writing about the invasion of identity which is another characteristic american problem which must be about to change. i hope so. it is giving me enough trouble. here is to integration, the only integration that counts for the personality. that letter to me is the best, most profound and that can be given to why ralph ellison did not finish this work. i am so proud to be here with adam, to introduce him, to have actually done this book to completion and to have been adam's teacher and friend, colleague, collaborator over the

years. growing relationship and to say that i think one of the things about collaboration is have to keep each other honest or you don't have a collaboration and -- how can i agree? requires a certain antagonistic cooperation. you kind of bump up against each other and a long way the bruises become a rainbow maybe if you can handle that metaphor. in any case, it seems to me that the book -- like the book what we managed to do, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and certainly the best thing i can say is my heart is full being here with this book being published, here with adam and i would say without adam the book wouldn't exist.

adam was indispensable all the way through to this book so thank you and congratulations. [applause] >> john stole all my best lines so i have to give you my second-best. let's hope that is good enough. i first met ralph ellison when i was 19 years old and he had already passed away. he hated ghost stories so that is not what this is. i met him as many of you did on the page. i met him in john callahan's african-american literature course, reading "invisible man" with a host of other great works of fiction but there was something about that novelette caught my attention. something about it that spoke to me of my own story.

elson once said of "invisible man" that it is my novel but "invisible man"'s memoir, the idea of a dual existence took on another existence, as i read it, i was reading what i thought was my own experience as a biracial kid growing up in utah without the black side of my community, finding myself more as an american life to afford my own identity of parts that were somehow still missing but still emerging. so there was a moment in particular when he appeared to me, if you will. it was on the campus of lewis and clark college which both of these men know quite well. very close to president mini's office where we requisitioned the entire space, the last table

had spread out -- john did something that looking back, what were you thinking? he gave, in 19-year-old sophomore the option to go up there and look at this material sometimes only being the fourth person who had never seen it. ellison, ellison's wife, john and finally meet. astounding thing to go from spanish class to reading a listen's unpublished second novel. mythic almost in its proportion. an astounding thing. to have this opportunity. and i was ready for it because i was and ellison groupie by that point. i had read "invisible man" and

he was my god. he was helping me to understand myself. he was helping me to understand literature. i was ready to be blown away. but then i saw something i never would have imagined from an author of this stature, something that forever changed the way that i would look at fiction both from the perspective of a teacher that i have become, the writer i have become and editor of this volume three days before the shooting. the thing that i saw was a typo. this may seem like a small sort of thing to notice but as i flipped through more pages i kept seeing additional moments like that, that even i as a 19-year-old kid could have the audacity to say i could write a better sense than that. i know how i could fix that

sentence. if he had done this or that slightly differently. i was feeling guilty even thinking this stuff. it is somewhat biblical, like the moses story, seeing the nakedness in that way and there was something make it about these moments late in ellison's life as he is moving from his 70s moving ford is 80s, still working on the same book he had started in the 1950s. but i saw something passed those typos and rough sentences. i saw the process of evolution. process of progression from draft to draft that would lead to moments of brilliance, moments of ellison at his highest power and moments of eloquence that were moving and taught me something about literature. it is not a piece of perfection

but rather a matter of progress and process. good writing is rewriting. that is a cliche for a reason. it came to life for the first time in a way that i understood it much more than i did in my fiction 101 class. i saw it through a lesson himself. it is in this spirit that we understand how to approach the editing of this manuscript. something that ellison began even before his finished writing "invisible man," something he continued through the decades as he lived his life. something that's on not only the civil-rights movement but the end, vietnam, women's liberation, the digital age, on

into the clinton administration. this is the second half of the 20th-century. the story pushed forward into the twenty-first and into john's and my life. it made me become a professor instead of a lawyer like i should have been. it made me become a writer and brought us to the position of trying to figure out how to bring it to you. how could we make this into something you would want to read. we knew we had been living with this novel in all its forms, we knew why we were passionate about it but part of the passion came in the fact of being a absorbent in it for so many years. how do we give that, picked up a

copy. this isn't a book you pick up on friday in time for sunday brunch. it requires an act of participation in the creation of fiction. it is that kind of book. not everyone is up to it but those who try will feel something we have felt. and intimacy with the literary master. a look into the craft of fiction but more than that, it is more than a scholarly edition that we intended it to be. it is really a reader's addition that is meant as all of ellison's fiction was meant to be, a work of fiction for every one. this is a book that ends with the line and it is this which frightens me, juneau's what on the lower frequencies i speak

for you. what kind of author would ellison be if he stopped with that vision. that radical idea of speaking for you, a democratic idea. rooted in the very concept of the democratic process. it gives you a glimpse into the writer and the man and the 20th-century leading into the twenty-first. [applause] >> thank you very much. you would have been a formidable lawyer but i am glad you chose our profession. i will do one more thing. i will ask each of these remarkable editors to choose a

brief passage from this book, read it and then we will elicit from all of your comments and questions. do you have something you could read? >> i read the letter of ralph's from 1954 and suggesting what he was up to in this book to stand on the cusp and project forward. one of the most moving and brilliant of his projections of this sort comes in book ii in the form of a hallucination by the wounded and dying senator adam in keeping with adam's

comments about the reader's responsibility and the responsibility of participation, i am going to resist the impulse to say thing. about this passage. i will put it where it ought to be, in your minds. and the hallucination, he is delirious and he hallucinates that the world is distorted and soon after this passage three black men, each in wonderful ellison idiom is speaking in different black patois. you get someone from jamaica and urban and southern black man and

each, they are not called you can tell by the way they speak, the author, the speaker changes and just before this the senator, utterly disoriented, spins into this kind of delirious referee. soo and the senator thought, it will come. they are beginning to stir. his old fighters he warned, watch hands, feet and head. they are moving out into the open and things are beginning to eve in the backwash is beginning. but hickman, here? unlikely. though the knows who it was who came? nine have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk. so soon they will come marching

out of the woodpile and the woodwork, soar ahead right up close. one shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds welcome for lessons unlearned but studying war once more. it is a big book. >> there are so many places to go to find something to read. i think what i want to do is read you something from the later years of ellison's rating. he turned to the laptop computer, one of the earliest laptop computers ever in 1980 or

81. it weighed 25 pounds. it had that fourç inch greenç screen monitor. yet somehow you get some really beautiful prose from this. he continued to right through the computer through the '80s in the 90s until as john mentioned the weeks and months before his death. what we have here is a bit of the old and a bit of the new. often it seems to our best judgment that what he did was take some drafts that he had begun before, stuck them by his computer and started playing with them, may be typing verbatim certain parts of what he had written years before were taking off on all sorts of different risks. one of the most fascinating things that he does is to take

seven pages or so of the prologue to the typescripts that he wrote in the 1970s and what he dispatches in less than that, a pair of half and half they both began with that line three days before the shooting which hickman in washington d.c. -- then it cuts to them going to the senate office building trying to find adam's sun. what ellison is doing in later years is take the same turn, seven pages or less and makes it into three -- 350 pages. what i am going to read you is a portion in which after they leave the airport, hickman, jazzman who turned preacher and has been surrogate father to a young boy who goes off even

though he is raised by black folks to live his life guarding across the color line and finally e. emerging as this racist new england senator and his assassination is the central action of the novel. so they have been stopped and the police discover something interesting in the case where hickman is carrying and that is where i will give it to you. what is this thing you have with it? the white man said as he fingered around a rubber object. that is how he employs it. a test to a stick. a tool for section. section? this is a toilet plunger. that is right. but not on a bandstand. so what is it doing here? that, hickman said as he sees the opportunity for striking

back at the captain, is because of a miracle. a what? that is right. a miracle which occurred long ago during a big public dance in new orleans and it came to pass after one of the musicians made the mistake of misplacing his new. the musician was terribly upsetting because he was famous for the boys like effects which it provided. the idea of disappointing his listeners became so disturbing that it sent him speeding on a trip to the men's room. but he was still upset. when he saw one of those standing beside him, a miracle took place. that is right, but only after the musician underwent a fierce struggle. he couldn't figure what he was doing with such a thing but being desperate to maintain his fine reputation and artistic standards he removed the rubber

cup from his wooden stick and lost it. and still puzzled by a sudden urge to handle something so filthy he tried it, stuck it in his pocket and returned to the bandstand. but it wasn't until he pressed its flexible end to the belt of his horn that he began to understand. that he began to understand just why his hand had moved so much faster in the men's room than his mind was able but when the time came to improvise one of his favorite tunes he rose with his horn in one hand and the toilet plunger in the other. he started to sweat and tremble and no wonder because when folks on the dance floor saw him they began laughing so hard that he felt like a fool but being a professional he bowed and signaled the drummer to accelerate the rhythm and come

to his aide and once he got going and muting his horn with that plunger the sound it produced was so thrilling that he brought down the house. [applause] >> i think ralph ellison is in very good hands and i hope you agree with that. time to turn this into a graduate seminar. at least another graduate seminar. who here has the question to start? use the mike. >> i just wanted to make a comment that from your reading i just thought that was a wonderful metaphor for the terror of creation. any artist who creates in any medium reaches that point of

unknown. of course he has no choice. he does what he needs to do. i understand what he meant, i believe. >> john and i seemed we had a toilet plunger in our hand at some point thinking how are we going to find a form that will make this something that readers will find accessible, that readers will find their way through. we think we have done it but the moment he describes captors something about the artistic temperament, lead daring needed to create art. it is all there and it is just one small moment in the novel. >> if i could that a brief addendum to that, it shows something of how ellison moved.

it is a pause in the action and a commentary on the action. in the exposition there is the drama of this munition's story. [inaudible] >> a quick clarification. i was leaving. when you laid out what is

contained in this, is the narrative interwoven? >> it is a ladder. this is the prologue to book i and book ii up to -- about -- let's see. the first five fifths of book ii, i inserted into that to second to last, the penultimate chapter. >> how self edited