SOURCE: O'Meally, Robert G. “Apprenticeship.” In The Craft of Ralph Ellison, pp. 56-77. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.

In the following essay, O'Meally traces Ellison's literary development through eight early short stories.

The years 1939 to 1944 were an apprenticeship for Ellison who, in a New York Post feature story of 1943, was bylined as “a short story writer.” He published eight stories during this crucial five-year span, and his writing grew in eloquence and complexity from story to story. He wrote many more stories than he tried to publish, looking upon them as practice pieces, “five-finger exercises.” Operating in an experimental attitude, Ellison would start writing a story by jotting down a few themes and then try to develop them into plots, scenes, images, and characters.

His first short stories (“Slick Gonna Learn” and “The Birthmark”) are in the realistic and naturalistic mold and highlighted the “jagged edges” of the...