Flying Home and other stories

Written between 1937 and 1954 and now available in paperback for the first time, these thirteen stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison. Six of them remained unpublished during Ellison's lifetime and were discovered among the author's effects in a folder labeled "Early Stories." But they all bear the hallmarks--the thematic reach, musically layered voices, and sheer ebullience--that Ellison would bring to his classic Invisible Man.

The tales in Flying Home range in setting from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlor, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War. By turns lyrical, scathing, touching, and transcendently wise, Flying Home and Other Stories is a historic volume, an extravagant last bequest from a giant of our literature.

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914.  He is the author of Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award and became one of the most important and influential postwar American novels.  He published two volumes of nonfiction, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), which, together with unpublished speeches and writings, were brought together as The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison in 1995.  For more than forty years before his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison lived with his wife, Fanny McConnell, in Harlem in New York City.