Playing in the Dark

The Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that changes the way we read American literature and opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.

Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree-and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.

Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is essential reading for all students, critics, and scholars of American literature.