In an age of uncertainty over what constitutes our common heritage, Andrew Delbanco reconsiders our greatest writers and how they enlarged our sense of American possibilities and the expressive range of our language. In superb chapters on Melville, Thoreau, Wharton, Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lincoln, and others, he shows how these writers celebrate the idea of the free individual while conveying the struggle to defend this ideal against hostile conditions and ideas.