![]() ![]() As the novel gained fame, its author, who had occasionally slept in Mount Morris Park while first trying to make it as a writer in New York, won a closetful of honorary degrees, medals, and memberships on distinguished boards and in honorary intellectual societies. ![]() (In 1985 Invisible Man was required reading for graduate students preparing to take a French national exam called l'agrégation.) It is a book with continuing word-of-mouth currency - passed around and "thumbed to pieces," as one critic observed, in libraries and homes. Called the Moby-Dick of America's racial crisis, Invisible Man may be the century's most translated, celebrated American novel. ![]() Here was a Cinderella writer, virtually unpublished except in journals, whose first novel, Invisible Man (1952), won the National Book Award, became a best seller, and within ten years of its publication began its career as a text routinely assigned in high school and college classrooms all over the nation and then around the world. Tales of the work's delayed progress have almost upstaged the new fiction itself. ![]() A novel set substantially in the black church and in or near the halls of Congress, Juneteenth concerns matters spiritual and political, and is braced with the rhythm of the blues. The best news is that Juneteenth is written with unmistakable Ellisonian zest, depth, and elegance, and that the work holds together as a complete, aesthetically satisfying, and at times thrilling whole. ![]()
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