The Nobel Prize-winning author now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change just how we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.

Toni Morrison’s amazing discussions of the ‘Africanist’ presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway network marketing leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential features of our literary custom. She shows how much the styles of about Playing In The Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Creativity independence and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended for the existence of the black populace that was manifestly unfree–and that found serve white writers as embodiments of their own fears and wishes.

Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Using in the Dark will end up being avidly browse by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

‘By choosing the American literary jugular…she areas her arguments…at the heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly…reimagines and remaps the chance of America.’

–Chicago Tribune

‘Toni Morrison may be the closest point the country has to a national article writer.’

The New York Times Book Review