African Americans
African Americans should be given credit for the most prolific body of Edenic literature because with no less than thirty revisions of the myth made since the turn of the nineteenth century, they have used the trope to question where they fit in American society. By presenting narratives that use African Americans as tortured and triumphant protagonists, authors like James Baldwin and Langston Hughes wove the Edenic tradition into their plots in an attempt to draw attention to the unequal division of societal power and chip away at the deeply ingrained American system that gives one group power over another; however, not one of the more than thirty authors has presented the myth with such innovative use of media than James Weldon Johnson and Toni Morrison. In his book Blacks in Eden: the African American novel’s first century, J. L. Greene argues that African-American texts have “proffered a view of American history that on the whole inverts the pervasive paradigm of Anglo-American literature” (6); however, the work of these two individuals did much more than merely upset the status quo; they found new and innovative ways to work outside the patriarchal confines of print to condemn the binary system.