Various aspects of 145 representative oral and written compositions of six- and seven-year-old new literates are discussed in this paper. The determination to label these compositions as "primitive fiction" was made primarily on the assumption that children's first attempts at fictive narrative take on the aspects of their cultural literary heritage, as each child reweaves the unique complexities of oral language patterns. Discussed are such topics as evidence of listener awareness, stylistic and rhetorical contrivances, and individualization in plots and motifs. It was concluded as follows: that through representative and interpretive projections, newly literate children show a marked preference for reappraising and reorganizing received literature in relation to their own sense of creative awareness; that the most predominate conventional patterns in the newly literate child's fiction are those which most resemble conventional aspects of oral traditional literature; and that the literature of newly literate children is a sophisticated form of primitive art which should be judged on its own terms and not by standards of contemporary adult literature. (TS)