Despite the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition, this genre still enjoys little critical currency. Theprologue provokes and engages the question: What is the essay? Through analyzing authors as diverse as W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, the book illustrates how black author sutilized the genre of the essay to make critical interventions in political and aesthetic debates. Freedom, it argues, is the subject which engages the black essayist across three centuries. The “will to adorn,” a phrase coined by Zora Neale Hurston, conveys the essayists’ attitude toward language—the desire to make language an expression of beauty. Building on three concepts: democratic eloquence, troubled eloquence, and vernacular process, the author signals a way, a method, for reading the African American essay. These terms do not follow a linear progression but are constantly in movement, and it is through their use that African American authors continued to offer new variations on the genre of the essay. The prologue argues for the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition. It moves the genre of the essay from the margin to the center.