SOURCE: "Ralph Ellison and the Example of Richard Wright," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 145-53.

In the following essay, Skerrett traces the influence of Richard Wright's works on the style and themes of Ellison's earliest short stories.

Richard Wright played an important part in the process by which Ralph Ellison came to see the composition of works of literature as the means of imaginative expression that would be his. Though he had studied a great deal of modern literature in the period of the middle 'thirties, while he was an undergraduate at Tuskegee Institute, and was thus familiar with many of the writers under discussion in New York when he arrived there in the summer of 1937, it was the example, the guidance, and the proximity of Wright that brought Ellison to a commitment to writing.

When Ellison came to New York after his third...