Books in the The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies series

Morrison brings her genius to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a perspective sure to alter conventional notions about American literature.

Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered yes in word and deed. Rorty challenges this lost generation to understand its potential role in the tradition of democratic intellectual labor that began with Whitman and Dewey.

In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering many diverse forms of expressive culture, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.

Blending autobiography, history, and criticism, this book is a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma and stands as testimony to Kazin's belief that "literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind."

Conventional wisdom attributes women's decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. This book shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men - both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it - as well as women.

In The Real American Dream literary scholar Andrew Delbanco shows how Americans have organized their days and ordered their lives-and ultimately created a culture-to make sense of the pain, desire, pleasure, and fear that are the stuff of human experience.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, including her father's striking account of his childhood in China, Tiger Writing not only illuminates Gish Jen's work but explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self-each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world.

Between loyalty and disobedience; between recognition of the law's authority and realization that the law is not always right: in America, this conflict is historic, with results as varied as the mass protests of the civil rights movement and the armed violence of the militia movement. Carter argues for the dialogue that negotiates this conflict.

Tracing a certain strain of conservatism to sources in a rich southern tradition, this book opens a powerful perspective on contemporary politics. As much a work of political and moral philosophy as of history, it reconstitutes the historical canon, re-envisions strengths and weaknesses of the conservative tradition, and broadens political debate.

Demos offers a portrait of how colonial Americans viewed their life experiences. The earliest settlers lived in a traditional world of natural cycles that shaped their behavior. During the transitional world of the American Revolution, people began to see their society with a linear world view.

Rich with philosophical asides, historical speculations, personal observations, and literary judgments, this book ranges from the circumstances of Doctorow's own boyhood and early work to the state of modern society, forming a "report" by turns touching and funny, ironic and exalted, and, in its unique way, universally to the point.

Greil Marcus delves into three distinct episodes in the history of American commonplace song and shows how each one manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one. In these seemingly anonymous productions, we discover three different ways of talking about the United States, and three separate nations within its borders.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse trains an autobiographical lens on a moment of transition in U.S. journalism. Calling herself "an accidental activist," she raises urgent questions about the role of journalists as citizens and participants in the world around them.

To Be the Poet is Kingston's manifesto, the avowal and declaration of a writer who has devoted a good part of her sixty years to writing prose, and who, over the course of this spirited and inspiring book, works out what the rest of her life will be, in poetry.