In this book, Ross Posnock shows that black writers, far from being recent arrivals, were arguably the first modern American intellectuals. W. E. B. Du Bois's ideal of a "higher and broader and more varied human culture" is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition that Posnock identifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural history. The book offers a much needed historical perspective on "black intellectuals" as a social category, ranging over a century - from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, from Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt to Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to Samuel Delany and Adrienne Kennedy. These writers challenge two durable assumptions: that high culture is "white culture" and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual.