Schor traces the development of Ralph Ellison's fiction from the earliest experiments to the major accomplishment of his novel "Invisible Man," the mature prose of the "Hickman" stories and other published portions of his novel-in-progress. The study considers the two-fold obligation Ellison felt in committing himself to literature: to contribute at once to the growth of literature and also to the shaping of the culture as he would like it to be. His stories, read sequentially, reflect his struggle to encompass this aim in his writing. In describing that fragment of American experience he...