There is a literature dedicated to fire—think of Dante, or Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”—and there is a literature consumed by fire quite literally. A seller of rare books I know once issued an entire catalogue devoted to books given over to the flames. The history of burnt offerings is long and varied, but among its highlights is William Carlos Williams’s first book, “Poems” (1909), most copies of which were destroyed when the shed they were stored in burned down. (Given that Williams was known to be rather ashamed of his début, one wonders if he had a hand in the conflagration.) There’s also Fire!!, the upstart effort of a younger Harlem Renaissance set that included Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston, who jokingly called themselves the Niggerati. The single-issue magazine lived up to its name when its unsold stock caught fire soon after publication. Nancy Cunard’s 1934 anthology, “Negro,” was—like many other titles—destroyed by the London Blitz. Still others fell victim to the ritualistic book burnings in Nazi Germany that provided a reminder to Americans of how fragile our freedoms are (though not enough of a reminder to stop white students in Georgia from burning a book by the Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet, earlier this fall). Yet fire has effects that aren’t easily controlled. As my bookseller friend knew, its ravages often leave the remaining copies of a work all the more valuable.

Then there’s Ralph Ellison. In 1967, a fire at his country house destroyed a portion of his second novel in progress—the much anticipated and already belated follow-up to his 1952 début, “Invisible Man.” Ellison’s account of the damage the fire caused only grew in time; as his biographer Arnold Rampersad points out, the blaze came to be depicted as the main reason that Ellison never completed the novel, despite decades of labor and masses of manuscript pages. He measured it once for an interviewer: well over a foot and a half of epic. A relatively cohesive version was assembled from drafts by John F. Callahan, his literary executor, and issued posthumously as “Juneteenth,” in 1999; a decade later, Callahan and Adam Bradley crafted a thousand-page volume of fuller overlapping fragments, published as “Three Days Before the Shooting . . .” Now Callahan and Marc C. Conner have brought out “Selected Letters” (Random House), running almost as long. Bearing in mind the epistolary origins of the novel as a literary invention, one can regard the results—sixty years of correspondence progressing to a narrative—as another Ellisonian magnum opus, one necessarily unfinished.

“Selected Letters” is wisely divided by decade, starting with the nineteen-thirties, and Ellison’s voice is urgent from the start. The volume begins with letters home to Oklahoma, to his mother, Ida Bell, whom Ellison, newly matriculated at the Tuskegee Institute, in 1933, variously begs and bosses around for things he needs. The letters are concerned with money, or, rather, its absence. Young Ellison worries over status, too, not so much asking his mother for help as demanding it: “Send me that money by money order and make it thirty dollars if possible.” He explains, “I travel with the richer gang here and this clothes problem is a pain.” Shoes, a coat, old suits, his class ring: the requests to his mother and stepfather repeat like a scratched record that still itches. “Don’t forget the uniform, it’s important” is a typical postscript.

Throughout the letters from the nineteen-thirties, Ellison shares the nation’s preoccupations: it’s the throes of the Depression, after all, and, like the popular music of the period, he’s nostalgic for better times in a place he doesn’t particularly wish to return to. Still, he writes his younger brother, Herbert, to send his regards to the “Dear Folks” back home: “Tell Dr. Youngblood that if he came here he would be married in a month. Tell him they are beautiful and brown-skinned.” If not quite “Black Is Beautiful”—a phrase that Ellison, who preferred the term “Negro” well into the nineteen-seventies, didn’t use—his homegrown aesthetic and influences are evident early.

While an undergraduate, he studied music as a trumpet player; according to his authorial mythology, he throws his horn over for writing, in which he finds a further music. But Ellison, we learn, also had a stint as a sculptor, an equally resonant metaphor for his later craft. In an April, 1936, letter to Herbert, he writes:

Sculpture is very difficult to photograph and though one piece has been attempted it was unsuccessful. No I am not in the school of music this year. I missed out because of many matters, and have had to take the regular college course. . . . I noticed how much you had improved in your last letter; that’s fine but watch your tenses and endings, don’t write fool when you mean fooling or fooled. All it takes is time and good habits.

In the summer of 1936, Ellison sets out for New York, where he has the good fortune of meeting Langston Hughes in the lobby of the Harlem Y.M.C.A., where both are staying; Hughes, as he would do for many aspiring black writers, gives Ellison advice and connects him with other black practitioners. Soon Ellison is addressing Hughes as “Lang,” and even stays with his adoptive aunt. “I’m following your formula with success, you know, ‘be nice to people and let them pay for meals,’ ” he writes Hughes. “It helps so very much.” He also thanks Hughes for sending him to Richmond Barthé, the African-American sculptor, who “has taken me as his first pupil much to my surprise and joy.” By the later years of the decade, Ellison is finding his way, never shy about his likes and his dislikes. He tells his mother that he prefers Barthé to the better-known sculptor Augusta Savage, “who offered to let me work at her studio, but was too busy to give much instruction.” (If he had joined her, he could have worked alongside Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Charles Alston in the robust artistic community that Savage cultivated at the Y and at the 135th Street Library, across the street, which later became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.) The letters reveal an artist searching for a form that could carry his vision of black life in all its dimensions.