Ellison started the book almost immediately after Invisible Man was published in 1952, and worked on it until his death from pancreatic cancer last year. The untitled novel, much of which is set in Washington during the 50s, was often announced as nearing completion but never quite made it.

The swift rise of Invisible Man, which is considered by many to be the single best postwar American novel, may have made Ellison reluctant to publish more fiction. A key incident in the novel the assassination of a political figureturned chillingly real with the slayings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the Kennedys, temporarily paralyzing the novelist. Then a house fire destroyed the manuscript, forcing a fresh start.

John F. Callahan, a professor of English at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, has received a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington to organize the work into its final form.

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There’s a lot to be done, Callahan said Thursday. The manuscript is in so many different formsnumerous computer disks from two computers, as well as typescripts and notes and jottings. Ellison said that for him, craft was an aspect of morality. My task is to be exceedingly careful and respectful of his craft.

By the end of his fellowship next spring, Callahan hopes to have a unified narrative to present to Fanny Ellison. She will make the final decisions, including whether to call it a finished or an unfinished novel. The scholar, whose commission was first reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, said it was too early to give a publication date. For at least 30 years, the book has been under contract to Random House.

The novel, parts of which were issued as short stories during the 60s and early 70s, tells of a black preacherthe Rev. Hickman, also known as God’s Trombonewho employs a light-skinned boy to rise out of a coffin during a revival act. The boy disappears, passes for white and turns into a racist senator from a northern state. Hickman and his followers track Sen. Sunraider to Washington, hoping to save him from an assassination attempt.

The book’s form, Ellison said, was a realism extended beyond realism . This is a crazy book and I won’t pretend to understand what it’s about.

The published stories were presented as letters, fuzzy musings, tirades, sermons, or lies, the scholar Robert G. O’Meally wrote in an essay on Ellison in 1993.