SOURCE: "Notes of a Native Son," in Times Literary Supplement, July 25, 1997, p. 22.

In the following review, Miller provides a positive assessment of Flying Home and Other Stories.

Ralph Ellison's celebrated novel Invisible Man, seven years in the making, appeared in 1952. It is an American Gothic delirium. Writing about it in such terms, a few years later, in his great book of the 1960s, Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler saw a method in the "madness" he took it to contain. The reason why this madness carried conviction was that "the Negro problem in the United States" was "a gothic horror of our daily lives".

The old-fashioned apartheid expression, "the Negro problem", should not prevent one from accepting that the novel's first-person narrator is an incarnation of the problem which America's Negroes have had to live with. Their very name has been a problem, and has...