Ellison's Folly?

Ralph Ellison as one of the great examples of writer's block in American letters? Not quite, saya a new book by one of those charged with going through his papers and assembling his unfinished second novel. (C.H.E)

Three Days Before the Shooting ... , the version that Callahan and Bradley assembled from the second-novel notes and drafts in the Ellison archive, runs to almost a thousand pages. It's a big book in every sense, full of democracy and demagoguery, race and religion, fathers (real and surrogate) and sons.

The archival evidence suggests that the computer gave Ellison more latitude for experimentation. "You can see Ellison at play in the computer files," Bradley says. "You can see him riffing on the word itself and having a lot of fun with his creation. At the same time, you can sense that the computer may have become an enabler of certain of Ellison's literary foibles, the biggest one being his near-mania for revision."