Perhaps no novelist has meant more to contemporary fiction than Toni Morrison. And in addition to being a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, Morrison spent seventeen years as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, teaching courses in African American studies, creative writing, and American literature.

Now, for the first time ever, Morrison’s lectures on the American canon are compiled together, granting readers unprecedented access to Morrison’s scholarship, critical eye, and relentless brilliance. Researching several of America’s most famous works and authors, Morrison illuminates the relationships between race, the arts, and life beyond the page.

Morrison looks closely at Melville’s Moby-Dick, Faulkner’s South, McCullers’s misfits, Stowe’s sentiment, Hemingway’s restraint. With an introduction from Morrison’s colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory book that once again displays Morrison’s intellectual and literary greatness.