Flying Home: and Other Stories
by Ralph Ellison 
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Fiction. African American Fiction. Short Stories. Historical Fiction. These 13 stories by the author of The Invisible Man "approach the elegance of Chekhov" (Washington Post) and provide "early explorations of (Ellison's) lifelong fascination with the 'complex fate' and 'beautiful absurdity' of American identity" (John Callahan). First serial to The New Yorker. NPR sponsorship.Tags
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Ralph Ellison is mainly known for his novel Invisible Man. This volume brings together 13 early short stories of which six had remained unpublished when the author died in 1994. Some of these stories are a bit difficult to read because of the use of African American slang and typical use of English. The stories are well worth reading for readers interested in fiction by African American authors. Many stories were written in the late 1930s and 1940s, a period which literary output is not often read. The volume comes with a 35-page comprehensive introduction to Ellison and these early stories. Particularly the first story, about racial violence in the U.S. is unforgettable.
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22+ Works 21,303 Members
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 show more 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. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Ralph Ellison has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
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Common Knowledge
- Original title
- Flying Home and Other Stories
- Original publication date
- 1996
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 371
- Popularity
- 84,196
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.87)
- Languages
- 5 — Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 17
- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 6
