The novelist Ralph Ellison spent more than four decades working on his second novel, a massive, sprawling manuscript that remained unfinished at his death in 1994. The book's tortured genesis has become nearly as significant to American literary history as its fragmentary content. Ellison published the first excerpts in 1960 and continued to revise obsessively, but a 1967 house fire destroyed a portion of the manuscript, and critics debated for decades whether the loss was catastrophic or merely one episode in an ongoing act of artistic perfectionism that would have prevented completion regardless.

John Callahan, Ellison's literary executor, assembled roughly 2,000 pages of drafts, notes, and fragments into a posthumous edition titled Juneteenth, published in 1999. The novel centers on a white supremacist senator named Sunraider who, after being shot on the Senate floor, is tended in the hospital by the Black preacher Alonzo Hickman — who, the narrative slowly reveals, raised Sunraider as a child under the name Bliss. The political and spiritual stakes of their reunion form the novel's emotional core.

Critics received Juneteenth with a mixture of admiration and unease. Many found Ellison's prose luminous — his use of jazz-inflected rhythms, sermonic cadence, and doubled consciousness recall the ambitions of Invisible Man. Others argued that Callahan's editorial choices inevitably shaped the novel in ways that obscure whether any particular arrangement of the material reflects Ellison's own structural intentions. A second, much larger edition, Three Days Before the Shooting, appeared in 2010, presenting the full archive of manuscript material rather than a tidy narrative, and allowing readers to encounter the work's fragmentary nature directly.