To be American is to downplay history in the name of hope, to ignore memory in the cause of possibility. Our great truth-tellers–mainly artists–remind us that history will lhaunt us and memory should keep us honest. Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Theodore Dreiser, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Lorrainne Hansberry and others spin out candid narratives and paintful truths about our all-too-human complicity with evil and evasion of dark realities, which no country or social experiment can ignore without danger. … They remind us of the all-too-human forms of mendacity and hypocrisy pervasive in American life.
Cornell West