Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature". Author of "Beloved", "The Bluest Eye", "Song of Solomon", and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, 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 argument 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.