SOURCE: Schor, Edith. “Short Stories: Early Explorations.” In Visible Ellison: A Study of Ralph Ellison's Fiction, pp. 15-36. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Schor underscores the importance of Ellison's early stories as “the arena for his discovery of the appropriate forms to express the African-American experience and for working out the meaning of the experience for himself.”

Upon publication of Invisible Man, critical comment encompassed, indeed often centered upon, Ellison's treatment of African-American experience. The general reaction can be summarized by Harvey Breit's comment: “What is exciting about it is that it hasn't really been written about except in a sociological way. That which for the sociologist presents itself as racial conflict becomes for the novelist the American form of the human drama.”¹ Since then, the relationship of African-American experience to art has frequently been the focal point of critical discussion, and Ellison, in both...