Ellison was a believer in the hybrid nature of American culture, a position clearly articulated in the essay "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks." Elsewhere, he writes about the music of jazzmen Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian, the fiction of Richard Wright and Stephen Crane, and about the creation of his novel, Invisible Man that rocketed him to fame. This book brings together the contents of Ellison's Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, as well as a dozen or so other essays and talks previously uncollected.