Herman Melville''s Moby-Dick a jazz novel? Nathaniel Hawthorne as playful as Charlie Bird Parker? Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison trading twelves, across the gulf of time, on the "American" character? These are just some of the questions explored in American Humors. Beginning with Hawthorne and ending with Toni Morrison, this book offers a jazz-inflected tour of the literary history of the United States. Along the way, we see how American writers extend the achievements of their literary ancestors; we see the well-springs of the creative process; we see how the insistence upon improvisation becomes the foundation for a national art form and way of life. With the nineteenth-century American Renaissance and the twentieth-century Harlem Renaissance serving as bookends, American Humors investigates the varied hues and frequencies of art and experience in the United States and the global context.