Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, this is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright-these writers used words to create a livable world—a "home"—for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society. It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history's most pernicious lies.