Visible Man

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF RALPH ELLISON

EDITED BY JOHN F. CALLAHAN AND MARC C. CONNER

Random House, 1,072 pp., $50

THERE IS SOMETHING mysterious about how Ralph Ellison became an enduring literary giant on the strength of one award-winning novel, (1952), and two collections of essays, (1964) and (1986). How the legend of his long-awaited second novel grew in fame with every year it was not published. And how after his death in 1994, the redaction of that novel, (1999), by John F. Callahan, cemented his reputation as a great American dreamer whose dream was deferred. (In 2010, we literary nerds were joyous to receive the full, overlong, was compiled, also edited by Callahan, which ran a whopping 1,136 pages.) One would be hard-pressed to find another literary figure, aside from Ralph Waldo Emerson (after whom Ellison was named), who rose so high on the basis of so few publications.