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 scene at Minton's during the forties that...