Ralph Ellison has often been cited by literary scholars as one of the 20th century’s most tragic examples of writer’s block: after the immense success of 1952’s Invisible Man, the author lived for more than 40 years without ever publishing a second novel. Yet, in Ralph Ellison In Progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the Shooting…, literary scholar Adam Bradley challenges this portrayal, asserting that 47,000 items in the Ralph Ellison Archive at the Library of Congress alone are enough to prove that writer’s block is hardly the relevant term.

In fact, Bradley explains, Ellison’s problem was quite the reverse: he could not stop writing. Between his mania for revision and the rapidly changing landscape of American culture, the second novel—an epic work about the assassination of a U.S. senator—was doomed to be forever growing and expanding without ever being contained between the two covers of a finished work.

Bradley, who is also one of the editors of YUP’s  Anthology of Rap, has been studying the work of Ralph Ellison since he fell in love with Invisible Man in a course taught by John F. Callahan at Lewis & Clark College almost two decades ago. When Ellison died the following year, Callahan was named literary executor, and Bradley became his research assistant, carrying boxes of manuscripts from the house where Callahan found thousands of pages of writing and correspondence (along with several unpublished short stories hidden in a briefcase under the dining room table). Working with Callahan, Bradley edited the fullest edition of Ellison’s unfinished second novel Three Days Before the Shooting…, published in 2010, and as a result, is one of the leading experts on the author—and the immense archive encompassing both his personal papers and endless rewritings, which are preserved on paper and the 25-pound laptop computer Ellison purchased in 1982.

Working from these manuscripts, and following Ellison backwards through his career to shed light on everything from his final months to his earliest writings, Bradley demonstrates the way in which Ellison was anything but a one-hit wonder, but rather a writer who was always truly In Progress. Indeed, Bradley writes, “The very things that make Ellison’s second novel imperfect are also what make it such a compelling metaphor for America. Protean, unfinished, grand in vision but often flawed in execution, marked by failures and triumphs, it reflects the complexities of American life in a way that a finished novel could not.”