"A compelling dissection of U.S, fiction...To recognize the black presence in white fiction as offering both threat and reassurance permits Morrison to challenge some of the most widely accepted generalizations about our literary history.... Morrison’s individual readings are not just convincing, they are alarming."

--San Francisco Chronicle

The Nobel Prize-winning author of Belovedand 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 thatwas 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.