Flying Home

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 Six of them remained unpublished during Ellison's lifetime and were discovered among the author's effects in a folder labeled "Early Stories."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 classicInvisible Man. The tales inFlying Homerange 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 Storiesis 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 <b>Invisible Man</b> (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, <b>Shadow and Act</b> (1964) and <b>Going to the Territory</b> (1986), which, together with unpublished speeches and writings, were brought together as <b>The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison</b> 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.