Flying Home and Other Stories

Ralph Ellison

Random House, 1996 - Fiction - 173 pages

Written between 1937 and 1954 and collected here for the first time, Flying Home and Other Stories represents the best of Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison's short fiction. There are thirteen pieces, six of which were never published in Ellison's lifetime. Ellison draws on his early experiences - his father's death when he was three; hoboing his way on a freight train to Tuskegee Institute to follow his early dreams of becoming a musician - to create stories that, according to The Washington Post, "approach the simple elegance of Chekhov".

Contents

• A Party Down at the Square: 3
• Boy on a Train: 12
• Mister Toussan: 22

About the author

Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1914 - April 16, 1994) has the distinction of being one of the few writers who has established a firm literary reputation on the strength of a single work of long fiction. Writer and teacher, Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, studied at Tuskegee Institute, and has lectured at New York, Columbia, and Fisk universities and at Bard College. He received the Prix de Rome from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955, and in 1964 he was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has contributed short stories and essays to various publications. Invisible Man (1952), his first novel, won the National Book Award for 1953 and is considered an impressive work. It is a vision of the underground man who is also the invisible African American, and its possessor has employed this subterranean view and viewer to so extraordinary an advantage that the impression of the novel is that of a pioneer work. A book of essays, Shadow and Act, which discusses the African American in America and Ellison's Oklahoma boyhood, among other topics, appeared in 1964. Ralph Ellison died on April 16, 1994 of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Flying Home and Other Stories
• Author: Ralph Ellison
• Editor: John F. Callahan
• Contributor: John F. Callahan
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Random House, 1996
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Jun 23, 2008
• ISBN: 0679457046, 9780679457046
• Length: 173 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / African American & Black / General; Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Short Stories (single author)