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  • Published: 18 July 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241215050
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $29.99

Flying Home And Other Stories




A collection of the best short fiction from the award-winning author of Invisible Man

Written between 1937 and 1954, these fourteen stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison. Seven of them remained unpublished during Ellison's lifetime and one, 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' is now included in Flying Home for the first time. But they all bear the hallmarks that Ellison would bring to his classic Invisible Man: the thematic reach, musically layered voices, and sheer ebullience.

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 twentieth century literature.

  • Published: 18 July 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241215050
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $29.99

About the authors

John Callahan

John Callahan is a quadriplegic who was paralyzed in an
auto accident in 1972, since then he has became a famous
cartoonist. He has been profiled on 60 Minutes and NPR's
Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He lives in Portland, Oregon,
where Callahan can been seen buzzing around his
neighborhood in his wheelchair.

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after the preacher-philosopher Emerson, was born in Oklahoma in 1914. His father died when he was three years old and he was brought up by his mother who worked as a domestic help in white households in order to support herself and her two sons. At the age of nineteen he won a scholarship to study music at the Booker T. Washington Tuskegee Institute. In 1936 he went to New York and there met the black writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. He started contributing to the Federal Writers' Project, set up as part of Roosevelt's New Deal, and soon his short stories and articles began to appear in magazines and journals.

In 1943 he joined the United States Merchant Marines returning to New York after the war. Awarded a Rosenwald fellowship he was able to concentrate on his writing and, seven years after starting it, his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952) was published. Immediately recognized as a classic in its own time, and described as a 'touchstone of the 1950s', it won the American National Book Award and established Ellison as one of the major figures of twentieth-century fiction. He also published two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), but his second novel, which he worked on for over four decades and repeatedly declared to be 'virtually finished', never appeared. Flying Home and Other Stories (Penguin 1996) is a collection of both published and previously unpublished short stories.

Ellison was highly regarded by both the literary and academic worlds. He was Fellow of the American Academy in Rome from 1955 to 1957 and on his return held several visiting professorships; latterly being Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at New York University. He received the United States Medal of Freedom in 1969, became Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1970, and received the National Medal of Arts in 1985. Ralph Ellison died in 1994, survived by his wife of forty-eight years. In his obituary, the Independent declared him 'a great gentleman, indeed a noble man, and the remarkable mythologising author of ... the great American Negro novel'.