Ralph Ellison

"Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the Reverend A. Z. Hickman, the interant Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, and orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. His history encompasses camp meetings where he became the risen Lazarus to inspire the faithful; the more ordinary joys of Southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker; lovemaking with a young woman in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?