Ralph Ellison may well have been the last of the great letter-writers. Beginning in the early 1930s, with his first hand-written letters to his mother while he was at Tuskegee Institute, all the way until a few months before his death in 1994, Ellison maintained a voluminous correspondence with many of the most notable writers and intellectuals of the 20th century. Often his letters become small essays, where he works out some of his most subtle and far-reaching ideas about literature, politics, history, race, and his most cherished theme, the great promise and painful betrayals of America. In letters to Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren, Albert Murray, Stanley Hyman, Kenneth Burke, and Richard Wright, Ellison maps the terrain that he would explore in his luminous chapters, in Invisible Man, and especially in his unfinished epic of America, Three Days Before the Shooting . . .