Rudolph Fisher only wrote his short story City of Refuge because he wanted to read something that was an accurate representation of day-to-day life in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. :The story first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1925 and was immediately very well-received. The story is built around King Solomon Gillis, a Southern black man who has migrated from South Carolina in order to escape lynching. Gillis is astounded by the freedom that he sees all around him when he arrives in Harlem and he settles in quickly, but ultimately, he does not have his guard up as much as he should and he is duped into selling medicines illicitly and ends up getting arrested.
The story was included in a collection of Fisher's short fiction in 1991, and it also appears in The New Negro : An Anthology, by Alain Locke who had also lived in Harlem at the same time as Fisher. Fisher had two stories included in the anthology, the other being Vestiges.
Fisher's stories often include references to medicine and this story is no different; Gillies is accused of selling medicine and gets into a great deal of trouble for doing so. Including medicine was a sort of literary security blanket for Fisher, who had begun his literary career writing in medical journals, having worked as a respected physician for many years before starting to write. He had also become known for his research into x-rays and the different ways in which they could provide information about a patient; it is believed that it was this experimentation, and his exposure to radiation, that led to Fisher's early death from cancer at the very young age of thirty-seven.
