Literary debut for Ralph Ellison’s literary executor

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On its list of new releases, Fulcrum Publishing has a political novel titled “A Man You Could Love,” which the publishing house plans to release at Book Expo in June and then follow it up with a multi-city author tour. The book might have quietly joined the many early summer releases arriving at bookstores if it hadn’t been written by John Callahan.

Callahan is Morgan S. Odell professor of humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., but his greater claim to fame is as Ralph Ellison’s literary executor and the person who edited the 2,000 manuscript pages of Ellison’s unfinished second novel into the form of “Juneteenth,” which Random House published in 1999. Callahan was attacked by some reviewers for performing what they saw as mere stitch-work on a book that, if Ellison couldn’t finish, no one should have finished. Now, though, we get a chance to assess Callahan’s literary merits on their own. The publisher describes his book as a coming-of-age novel that “chronicles the career of a crusading politician” and ranges over 40 years “from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the power corridors of Washington, D.C.”

Nick Owchar