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

Toni Morrison’s excellent discussions from the ‘Africanist’ presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway potential clients to a dramatic reappraisal of the fundamental characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows just how much the styles of about Playing AT NIGHT: Whiteness as well as the Literary Imagination independence and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended for the existence of the black human population that was manifestly unfree–and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and wishes.

Written using the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Taking part in at night will become avidly go through by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

‘By going for the American literary jugular…she locations her arguments…at the very heart of contemporary general 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 is the closest matter the country has to a national article writer.’

THE BRAND NEW York Times Book Review