Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events and forms of social decay, economic division and human panic. Her point is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daringly original perspective that aims to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examines the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of "Huckleberry Finn". A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is an exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction.