Critics have long passed over the place of Haiti in early American writing. Faherty argues the reverse of neglect: anxiety about the Haitian Revolution ran all through the print culture of the young republic.

Writers of the period, he shows, treated Haiti as at once entirely recognizable and impossible to accommodate, grasped and pushed away in the same motion. Haiti served them as a warped mirror of the United States: a version of its own past, an uncomfortable rhyme with its present, and a warning about the futures that division might bring.

The book asks how American literary history came to write that centrality out, and in answering it recovers texts that had dropped from view, correcting what Faherty takes to be a significant blind spot in the field.