New York Observer
Eye-opening...remarkable...Ellison puts to shame most of this season's new story collections...Anyone who thinks writers are made, not born, should read Flying Home.
Robert A. Butler
Flying Home and Other Stories, superbly edited by John F. Callahan, is an important event in American and African American literary life...this book finally makes it possible to bring Ellison's short fiction productively into the classroom, where it can be studied for its own merits and for the ways in which it illuminates his great novel Invisible Man....Ellison studies are about to enter an exciting new phase, thanks in no small measure to the publication of Flying Home and Other Stories. -- African American Review
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
To read Ellison's early short stories after having read Invisible Man is like looking at the first sketches and blueprints of parts of the Taj Mahal after having stood in the complete palace itself. Most of these 12 early stories (written between 1937 and 1954) are clearly apprentice work in which Ellison is struggling for control of voice, timing and structure. In the earliest work (including "Hymie's Bull," his very first story), Ellison tries to shoehorn his own experience, including hoboing freight trains in the 1930s, into some boxed-in notion of literary form. But Ellison was a fast learner. While the four stories featuring the antics of Buster and Riley, two smart-mouthed African American boys, owe more than a bit to Mark Twain's Huck and Tom, they also show Ellison developing more supple language and a comic touch. "A Party Down at the Square" (discovered by Callahan, his literary executor, shortly after the writer's death in 1994), is an account of a lynching breathlessly narrated by a white Cincinnati boy visiting his uncle in Alabama. In the dramatic title story, Todd, a black pilot, a northerner trained at Tuskegee, crash-lands in rural Alabama and is rescued from redneck medics by Jefferson, an old black man exuding rustic ways and folksy tall tales. Though Jefferson represents everything Todd is trying to escape, the old man's wisdom and quick thinking ultimately lead the pilot to a reaffirmation of his roots. In these later stories, the moral core of Ellison's great novel is apparent: the passion for simultaneously exploring black identity and American identity, the determination to write deeply about race without writing only about race. His stories display, individually, the commitment to craft and, collectively, the acquired range that later enabled him to assemble, block by block, one of the great monuments of American literature.
Library Journal
This posthumous collection features 13 of Ellison's short stories, written when the young musician first tried his hand at fiction at the suggestion of Richard Wright. Opening with "Hymie's Bull," written in 1937, the stories describe a lynching ("A Party Down at the Square"), the adventures of preteens Buster and Riley ("Mister Toussan," "Afternoon," and "That I Had the Wings"), and a sojourner's tale ("In a Strange Country"). Humor is at the heart of the Buster and Riley stories, while sorrow rings though "Boy on a Train." Fine examples of work by a literary artist, these stories present an array of writing modes that effectively captures Ellison's talents. -- Fannette H. Thomas, Essex Community Coll., Baltimore, Md.
School Library Journal
Ellison's refined style of dialogue and detailed descriptions coupled with the radition of African-American storytelling make this a readable collection. Written between the 1930s and the 1950s, these 13 short stories, 6 of which were previously unpublished, capture a variety of moods. In "A Party Down at the Square," a white boy tells of witnessing his first lynching. Four stories introduce Buster and Riley, two preteens whose antics are laughable and conversations witty. One story deals with a four-year-old's first sense of prejudice with his father by his side. In "Flying Home," a Tuskegee Airman crashes into an Alabama field and faces, once again, the stark realities of segregation. Callahan's scholarly introduction presents a personal look at Ellison's youth. However, it is through the stories that one can begin to understand the complexities of a divided nation. YAs familiar with Invisible Man should appreciate this offering. At the same time, the mix of action and adventure will hold the attention of general readers.Connie Freeman, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana
New York Observer
Eye-opening...remarkable...Ellison puts to shame most of this season's new story collections...Anyone who thinks writers are made, not born, should read Flying Home.
Shelby Steele
...[O]ne is immediately struck by the wariness, the self-possession, and the cool introspection of the characters....there is always an intelligence at work, a consciousness that quests for possibility....the book's controlling metaphor [is] flight, by which Ellison...intends to represent freedom. -- The New Republic
Kirkus Reviews
This marvelous collection of 13 stories, six of which were never published during Ellison's lifetime, partly explains the phenomenon of Invisible Man, itself no ordinary first book. Had Ellison published this volume first (all of these narratives were written before his landmark novel), it would have been the debut of a voice to reckon with, if not the heavenly choir of Invisible Man. This early work improvises on some of Ellison's great themes: the way in which stereotypes obscure and deform our common humanity; the quest for a distinctly American identity; and the promise of democratic culture. A quartet of stories about youngbloods Buster and Riley—an embryonic novel of sorts—shows the fully absorbed influence of Twain. Ellison's Huck and Tom, full of innocent devilment, laze away the days signifying, doing the dozens, and just getting into trouble. In a brilliant down-home retelling of the Toussaint L'Ouverture story "Mister Toussan," Ellison's charming miscreants find precedent for their own rebellious desire to snatch cherries from a white man's yard. Three railroad tales document the plight of "black bums" who are treated with particular harshness by the guards. "I Did Not Learn Their Names" recalls a kind, elderly couple riding the rails to visit their son—a hard-luck story that suggests the happiness sometimes found in adversity. The struggling black railroad workers in "A Hard Time Keeping Up" finally give in to hilarity, a kind of release, at a late-night joint. While one young man finds momentary power onstage at a matinee bingo game, another is profoundly mortified when he crashes his plane during training as a military pilot. "In a StrangeCountry" is pure Ellison: A black sailor, fresh from a racial incident with a countryman, discovers in a local Welsh singing club the sense of transcendent national pride and unity he longs for back home. Glorious, pre-Invisible Man riffs—and another fine addition to the Ellison oeuvre.
