Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now presents a sophisticated, elegant, and eloquent work of literary criticism that promises to revolutionize the way read American literature while also opening a new chapter in the American discourse on race. Toni Morrison's remarkable examinations of the "Africanist" presence in the literature of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway result in a radical reconsideration of the key qualities of the literary past.

She demonstrates how much the concepts of freedom and individuality, manhood and innocence, were dependent on the existence of a clearly unfree black population—which came to serve white authors as avatars of their own anxieties and ambitions. Unlike the other books on this list, this is not a novel; rather, it is a collection of three lectures Morrison gave at Harvard in the early 1990s, in which she discusses the various ways white writers pushed the African-American experience to the margins in order to establish a collective American literary identity.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/37405.Playing_in_the_Dark