Morgan S. Odell
Professor of Humanities
Director of Inventing America
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John F. Callahan was named the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities in fall 1994, during the centennial year of Morgan Odell, who lived from 1894 to 1984. Callahan is widely recognized for his work in American and African-American literature. He is the author of In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in 20th Century Black Fiction; and The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. His numerous publications include essays on African-American writers and his friends Ralph Ellison, Michael S. Harper, and Alice Walker. His Modern Library edition of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison was published in the fall of 1995 by Random House. Flying Home and Other Stories: was published fall 1996. Callahan earned his doctoral and master's degrees from the University of Illinois and his bachelor's degree from the University of Connecticut. Callahan currently teaches and directs Inventing America at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. |
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In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in 20th Century Black Fiction From his personal and cultural perspective as an Irish-American writing about black American writers. John Callahan traces the impact of African and African-American oral storytelling techniques on twentieth-century fiction. Through an analysis of works by Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and others, Callahan demonstrates how African-American writers have pursued freedom, equality, and diversity through the use of voice. He shows the different ways these writers call their readers to affirm and live up to American first principles by witnessing and participating in what Alice Walker terms our "one immense story." |
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The
Collected Essays of Compiled and edited by Ralph Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library edition includes previously uncollected and newly discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews in addition to the essay collections Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory. This edition includes an introduction by John F. Callahan and a preface by Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.
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Flying Home and Other Stories Written between 1937 and 1954 and collected here for the first time, Flying Home and Other Stories represents the best of Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison's short fiction. There are thirteen pieces, six of which were never published in Ellison's lifetime. Ellison draws on his early experiences--his father's death when he was three; hoboing his way on a freight train to Tuskegee Institute to follow his early dreams of becoming a musician--to create stories that, according to The Washington Post, "approach the simple elegance of Chekhov." Flying Home fulfills Ralph Ellison's desire to publish a short-story collection, but it wasn't until his literary executor, John F. Callahan, discovered a folder marked "Early Stories" in Ellison's apartment after the writer's death that this collection began to take shape. According to Callahan, "Discovery of the half dozen early stories made it possible to put together a volume of Ellison's best published and unpublished freestanding fiction. These stories are early explorations of his lifelong fascination with the complex fate and beautiful absurdity of American identity. In them, a young writer finds his voice and sets about mastering his craft."
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