Volume 48, Number 1 · January 11, 2001
Riffs
By Darryl Pinckney
Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
edited by Albert Murray and John F. Callahan
Modern Library, 237 pp., $24.95
When eighty-four-year-old Albert Murray came to an Upper West Side bookstore last August to read from Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, he expressed his gratitude to John F. Callahan, Ellison's literary executor and editor. He said that no one had done more than Callahan to see that Ellison's work was in print. Murray meant The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories, and Juneteenth, a novel, a narrative sequence, a book-length excerpt of the long, mysterious, obsessive work that Ellison still had not let go of at the time of his death in 1994.[1] Thanks to Callahan, there are more Ellison titles now than existed during his lifetime.
Review, 5858 words
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