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but a means of calling the reader’s attention to the fact of these manuscripts’ incompletion. We believe that Three Days Before the Shooting … is fitting, not only because it gestures toward the central incident of the novel—the shooting of Senator Adam Sunraider—but also because the numerous changes Ellison would make to the opening sentence over the years reflect the novel’s dogged incompletion. As Ellison revised the manuscript, the three days became two—a small change, but one that suggests a significant adjustments to the architecture of the plot, telescoping action and underscoring the narrative tension that charges this central incident. We have kept “three days” in the title as a gesture to the many other small changes across the manuscripts that, in their sum, embody so much of what Ellison’s second novel is—and is not.
The present edition has been in the works since 1999, when Juneteenth was published. In the judgment of its editor, Juneteenth represented “the most ambitious and latest, freestanding, compelling, extended fiction in the saga.” He promised then an edition would be published that would “enable scholars and readers alike to follow Ellison’s some forty years of work on his novel-in-progress.” This edition makes good on that promise, reproducing Ellison’s words precisely as he wrote them, save for the occasional silent correction to typographical or spelling errors. We have made a special effort to preserve rather than obscure the provisional character of some of Ellison’s writing—including tics and quirks that might well have been edited out of the manuscript had Ellison been alive to oversee its publication. These are important to the intrinsic value of these drafts for what they reveal about Ellison as a stylist and his idiosyncratic process of composition and revision.
In every case, the text selected represents the latest continuous sequence of narrative from the particular period of Ellison’s composition. For the Book I and II typescripts, we’ve reproduced the manuscripts clearly marked with the latest date in Fanny Ellison’s hand. With the computer drafts, we have reproduced those files marked with the most recent dates. (This process is described in detail in the essay that introduces the computer sequences.) We carefully reviewed all earlier variants with an eye toward noting textual differences and understanding Ellison’s compositional process and have included a sample of these variants in Part III. All of these materials will now be made available to scholars in the Ralph Ellison Papers at the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress holdings include twenty-seven boxes (115 to 141) containing files related to the second novel, compared with only eleven boxes related to Invisible Man . Two boxes (132 and 133) include the typescriptsfor Books I and II that Ellison composed in 1972 and continued revising until at least 1986. Another four boxes (138 to 141) include Ellison’s notes relating to the novel during the entire span of its composition. Four others (134 to 137 and a single file in 138) comprise sequential fragments Ellison printed out from his computer and often amended by hand. The remainder of the collection includes episodic drafts filed by scene or character containing material from throughout the novel’s composition, much of it with ample revisions.
To say that Ellison did not come close to completing his second novel is not to say that he failed to produce a work of fiction with scenes as fully rendered and realized as anything he had ever written. One forgets that Invisible Man was a first novel and, even in its brilliance, displayed some of the signs of an initial work. The second novel sometimes reveals Ellison working at the height of his writerly powers, in command of voice, in command of the rudiments of his prose style, in ways not seen in Invisible Man . Other times, it sees him at his lowest points—unfocused, and finally