Race is central to American history. It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding how race has been defined and deployed at every stage of the nation's history. Offering a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the history of race, The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature shows how this history has been represented in literature, and how those representations have influenced American culture. Written by leading scholars in in African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies, the essays in this volume address the centrality of race in American literature by foregrounding the conflicts across different traditions and different modes of interpretation. This volume explores the unsteady foundations of American literary history, examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and then considers various aspects of the multiple literary and complexly interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape.