Content provided in partnership with
"Some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood": An Interview with John F. Callahan, Editor of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth - Interview
African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Christopher C. De Santis, John F. Callahan
De Santis: What will the scholarly edition include?
Callahan: Well, there are eight big sections or fragments if you want, all parts of this unfinished novel. I may well include them all. There's one piece that might make a hell of a novella all by itself. It's occurred to me to publish that, alternatively titled "Night" and "Mother Strothers," with the four excerpts previously published that were not included in Juneteenth, but I'm leaning toward publishing all of these eight major parts of the novel in a single-volume scholarly edition. In a way that's the easy part. The order in which they should be presented is another matter and inevitably will have to be the editor's choice. Some of Ellison's notes point in one direction, others in another, and still others in a third or fourth direction. I also intend to compile a large selection of Ralph's notes in this volume.
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
De Santis: Do you have any other plans in terms of editing the various manuscripts and papers?
Callahan: Yes, there are Ralph's letters, which are very important, and should be published in a volume probably to be called the Collected Letters of Ralph Ellison. It probably won't be complete, because there are too many, but the best of the letters are splendid. And there are a couple of memoirs, one a wild thing, dreamlike, almost hallucinatory in parts, that Ralph wrote about Oklahoma, and then another, briefer one that he wrote about New York in 1959 or 1960 for Esquire, I think, but they didn't publish it. It's conceivable that they could be companion pieces in a single volume. Then there's that potential novella that I mentioned while discussing the scholarly edition. Hickman figures in it. It might be able to stand on its own. Yes, and there are the Ellison/Murray letters that are scheduled for publication at the same time the paperback of Jun eteenth comes out in June of 2000. That's the plan Mrs. Ellison and I have in mind, so you can see that the writer who some thought was a one- or two-book man is ending up with a very substantial oeuvre, quantitatively as well as qualitatively. He's becoming more and more visible and more and more important with each new volume.
Christopher C. De Santis is Assistant Professor of American and African American Literature at Illinois State University. He is the editor of Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62, a contributor to The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and other reference books, and the author of essays and reviews that have appeared in African American Review, American Studies, American Book Review, CLA Journal, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Journal of American Culture, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the Southern Quarterly. De Santis is currently editing The Collected Essays of Langston Hughes.
John F. Callahan is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of numerous essays on American and African American literature, and his books include The Illusions of a Nation and In the African-American Grain. He is editor of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories, and, with Albert Murray, Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. Callahan is literary executor of Ralph Ellison's estate.
COPYRIGHT 2000 African American Review
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Technology
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »