Short Story Criticism | Ellison, Ralph (Vol. 79) - John F. Callahan (essay date January 1997)

John F. Callahan (essay date January 1997)

SOURCE: Callahan, John F. Afterword to “A Party Down at the Square.” Esquire 127, no. 1 (January 1997): 93-4.

[In the following essay, Callahan describes his discovery of Ellison's forgotten short story “A Party Down at the Square” and briefly explicates thematic and stylistic aspects of the tale.]

Ralph Ellison was no stranger to Esquire. As a college student in the thirties, he read early issues in black barbershops around Tuskegee, Alabama, and back in Oklahoma City, when he went home on vacation. In a 1958 letter to Saul Bellow, Ellison noted “the impact of the old Esquire magazine on kids in the provinces.” He singled out a Thomas Mann essay, Hemingway's “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and Fitzgerald's blues-toned “Crack-up” pieces. To the end of his life, the author of Invisible Man was proud of “The Golden Age, Time Past,” his memoir of the jazz...

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