[5] After working a variety of jobs during World War II, he received an appointment to the faculty of Saint Mary's College of California in 1947.
"[4] The San Francisco Bay Area also played a significant role in his fiction, serving as the setting for three of his four novels (Parktilden Village, David Knudsen, and In the World) and a number of his short stories ("A Family Matter", "Children of Ruth").
His first published short story, "The NRACP" (the acronym stood for "National Relocation Authority: Colored Persons"), appeared in The Hudson Review in 1949.
[4] He went on to publish a number of well-regarded short stories in The Hudson Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other journals during the next decade that were later collected in his book, Among the Dangs (1961).
Reviewing the book for Commentary, Robert Brustein called it "a satiric nose-thumbing at the age of the social sciences and ... a plea for the restoration of certain values which the permissive disciplines have squeezed out of the human spirit.
Its story centered on the title character, the son of a nuclear scientist, who suffers from radiation sickness due to exposure to fallout a hydrogen bomb test his father had been responsible for.
[15] His autobiographical essays, many of them, such as "A Piece of Lettuce", "A Brown Pen", and "Growing Up on a Carob Plantation", based on his experiences as a teenager on his family's farm outside Riverside, have been called "among the most original and impressive of all his literary production.
"[15] David J. Gordon wrote that Elliott's best essays combine "cultural-literary comment with a kind of personal reminiscence that offers us a few glimpses into the role his temperament played in the formation of his opinions.