Whatever Happened To ... The Ellison Scholars?: They were two scholars hard at work on a book project that had already taken them more than 13 years. They were trying to get inside the psyche of a great novelist who had left behind four decades of work on an unfinished book when he died in 1994.
The novelist was Ralph Ellison, whose titanic literary work, 'Invisible Man,' published in 1952, seemed to have a profound effect upon the citizenry when it came to talking about race. The scholars, John Callahan and Adam Bradley, had taken on the mammoth process of piecing together thousands of pages of Ellison's words to complete his long-anticipated second novel. When they were featured in a Washington Post Magazine story Aug. 19, 2007, they imagined they were a year or so from publication.
The men would labor another 2 years. In January, 'Three Days Before the Shooting,' a voluminous work of 1,136 pages, was published by the Modern Library imprint. Bradley said it took longer than expected to examine additional Ellison documents. The copy editing process for such a huge, complicated manuscript also caused delays, he said.
