Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hawthorne's birthplace and the House of seven Gables, which inspired his novel of that name, sit side by side a few blocks from the Customs House...
Perhaps it is only fitting that Juneteenth (Random House; 368 pages; $25), Ralph Ellison's long-awaited second novel, almost 50 years in the making, would be published in 1999, the centennial year of Duke Ellington's birth. For Ellington and Ellison, along with the painter Romare Bearden, were practitioners of a shared aesthetic, three titans of an African-American modernism, embodying in their work elegance, eloquence and elan...
Ellison (who had tried both music and painting as careers) did not introduce modernism to his chosen art form as Ellington did. Rather, he introduced black music to literary modernism, creating in his first novel, Invisible Man, a symphony of magisterial jazz riffs centered on Carl Jung's claims that "the Negro...lives within [the American's] skin, subconsciously," and on the firm belief, shared with Bearden and Ellington, that it is the self--the black self, however buffeted by racism--that is the ultimate repository of one's fate. Destiny and liberation were inextricably tied to the solitary will...
Despite Hickman's attempts to warn his long-departed prodigal son, a black assassin shoots Sunraider on the floor of the Senate. The novel's action takes place on what we assume to be the Senator's deathbed in the form of remembered riffs of sermons, folktales, signifying and the dozens, in an often dazzling extended call-and-response pattern suggestive of two dueling horns in an after-hours gig at a jazz club...
DIED. J.F. POWERS, 81, National Book Award-winning author for Morte d'Urban, his first novel; in Collegeville, Minn. Powers never reached a wide audience, but his lives of Roman Catholic priests were gems of storytelling...