SOURCE: "The Short Fiction of Rudolph Fisher," in Langston Hughes Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 18-24.

In the following essay, Tignor traces the principal themes, character types, and settings in Fisher's short fiction.

In 1925, Rudolph Fisher broke into the predominantly white publishing world with his short story "City of Refuge," a triumph commented upon in this letter from Arna Bontemps:

I saw and talked with Rudolph Fisher frequently between the date of publication of his story "City of Refuge" in the Atlantic Monthly and August 1931 when I left New York. Earlier Countee Cullen had told me that someone had told him about a young writer from Washington who had just sold two stories to the Atlantic. This news had gone around literary circles in Harlem, because up to that time none of the young writers of the New Negro Movement had been able to break into that magazine...