The Invisible Man/Juneteenth (Collectible Editions)

Penguin Random House, 2018. Hardcover. Very Good/No Dust Jacket. Beautiful book, never been read, very tight binding. Slight bumping to corners and a couple small dings to gold gilt on top page edges. Together for the first time in a single volume: two classics of the modern African-American experience from Ralph Ellison. In Invisible Man the nameless narrator describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style that won the National Book Award in 1953. Here is Ellison, the master of American vernacular-the preacher's hyperbole and the politician's rhetoric, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech-at the height of his powers, telling a powerful, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century. In Juneteenth we hear "Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying senator Adam Sunraider to the Reverend A. Z. Hickman, the itinerant Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. His history encompasses camp meetings where he became the risen Lazarus to inspire the faithful; the more ordinary joys of Southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker; lovemaking with a young woman in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?