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unable to master his own creation.
For all their disconnections, Ellison’s manuscripts reward the active reader. For those willing to confront the challenges of the work’s fragmentary form, for those capable of simultaneously grasping multiple versions of the same scene, Three Days Before the Shooting … offers unparalleled access to the craft of Ellison’s fiction and an unprecedented glimpse into the writer’s mind. Whether one reads this edition from start to finish or jumps from section to section, the experience involves a kind of collaboration with Ellison in the creation of the novel he left forever in progress.

P ART I

EDITORS’ NOTE TO BOOK I
    T HE FULL PROVENANCE OF Book I is uncertain. The best information we have is a note in Fanny Ellison’s hand indicating that the most recent surviving draft was typed in 1972 and that Ellison’s editor, Albert Erskine, had read it. Drafts of individual episodes written, in all probability, during the mid-to late 1950s exist on both blue and yellow paper in the Ellison Papers.
    Readers will quickly see that, unlike the thoroughly revised, apparent last typescripts of Book II and “Bliss’s Birth,” the text of Book I drifts between truly polished and rough work. Nevertheless, however rough the composition of several passages in the typescript, the prologue and fourteen chapters answer in the affirmative for Book I the question Mrs. Ellison posed for the entire novel. (“Does it have a beginning, middle, and end?” she asked in Ralph’s teeming study a few days after his death in 1994.) For, unlike Book II, and unlike the sequences of computer printouts published in Part II of this volume, Book I, even in its current form, somewhat uneven and full of small inconsistencies, unquestionably has “a beginning, middle, and end.”
    In contrast to Book II, which though highly polished for the most part and put through multiple revisions over at least two decades, seems to break off in midair without any true hint of what is to come, Book I ends with a perfectly modulated sentence. The words both recapitulate the action and point toward what follows in Book II. “But at least the Senator was still alive,” McIntyre observes, recovering his reporter’s equilibrium after he watches Hickman and Hickman alone disappear through the closing door of Sun-raider’s hospital room. At once we know that the Senator has conferred special status on Reverend Hickman in the present moment and that he likely is doomed to die of his wounds. Like a crafty veteran major league pitcher, the novelist can throw any number of pitches from this delivery, and he does so by opening Book II with Sun-raider speaking extemporaneously, floridly, provocatively on the Senate floor just before an assassin’s bullets silence him.
    Clearly the trajectory of Book I is true to the central narrative Ellison refers to over and over again in his notes. After the prologue’s biblically toned chronicle of Reverend Hickman and his congregation’s arrival in Washington, D.C., Book I unfolds in first-person voice from the point of view of Welborn McIntyre, a Kentucky-born and - bred white reporter who witnesses Senator Sun-raider’s assassination, and sets out to unravel the identity, mystery, and motive of the “pale young Negro” who leaps to his death after shooting the Senator. Throughout Book I McIntyre and Ellison tantalize the reader with cryptic hints of the assassin’s tie to the Senator and Sun-raider’s former life as Bliss, the boy of indeterminate race raised by Reverend Hickman and the women in his black congregation.
    McIntyre roots his narrative in both the present and the past. The present episodes bring to life the fascination Sun-raider inspires in McIntyre’s journalists’ fraternity and in others, most notably the antic, tragicomic figure of jazzman LeeWillie Minifees, whose burning of his Cadillac on the Senator’s lawn lands him in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital