Race and Class as Catalysts for Obscuring a Novel

Best-selling Stanley Ellin’s long-time publisher, Random House, turned against him when he attempted to publish The Light Fantastic, claiming that the novel was “unsuitable.” The secretly racist narrator, a middle-class professor, struck too close to home for the major publishers. Ellin turned in 1983 to a small publisher who disregarded that one of the narrators held class hatred intertwined with racism. Ellin placed his novel in a Flatbush Brooklyn neighborhood like his own before “white flight” changed it to predominately African American. Textual analysis and publisher’s correspondence documents that Ellin held up a mirror of middle-class America, unwelcome then and now.