SOURCE: Mazurek, Raymond A. “Writer on the Left: Class and Race in Ellison's Early Fiction.” College Literature 29, no. 4 (fall 2002): 109-35.

In the following essay, Mazurek examines the key themes of class and race in Ellison's Flying Home and Other Stories and argues that these early short stories offer insight into his leftist political ideology as well as his growth as a writer.

Eight years after his death, Ralph Ellison's work is undergoing a reassessment. Invisible Man, the only volume of fiction Ellison published during his lifetime, has long been recognized as a major novel; indeed, it has been named as the most significant post-1945 U.S. novel in three different surveys published from 1965 to 1990 (“American Fiction,” 1965; Freidman, 1978; Mazurek, 1990). However, the last five years have seen the publication of a posthumous volume of stories, Flying Home and Other Stories, along with the Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, both containing...