With the death of Ralph Ellison in April 1994 and the recent publication of his posthumous-and long-awaited-second novel, Juneteenth, the curve of the career of the author of Invisible Man would now appear to be complete. Although the version of Juneteenth produced by John Callahan, Ellison's literary executor, promises to be the topic of continuing controversy-particularly when the entire Ellison archive becomes available to the public-the novelist's oeuvre now exists in its totality, ready to provide grist for many a critical mill.1 Much of the coming wave of revisionary scholarship will no doubt consider Juneteenth as the endpoint of a lifelong trajectory. What should not be overlooked, however, is the new light that the opening archive sheds on the early stages of Ellison's writerlyand, I shall argue, political-experience. Most of those who have written on Ellison have assumed that the novelist's apprenticeship occurred within the seven years during which he was working on Invisible Man. Among those relatively few critics who have bothered to read any of Ellison's early fiction, the near-unanimous opinion has been that, even though the quasi-surrealist tales King of the Bingo Game and Flying Home and some of the early Buster and Riley stories manifested Ellison's predilec-