“Do You See a [Hu]man Sitting Here?”

Walter Dean Myers’s Monster is cutting-edge contemporary realistic fiction. Monster earned its status as a classic largely due to its unique subject matter and its multigenre format. Henry Louis Gates argued that within African American literary theory, signifying is also a form of revision, a trope rooted in Black American literature that manifests itself through theme, rhetoric, and literary history. Mary Helen Washington described the result of signifying, [W]riters speak to other writers. Inspired by Myers’s interviews with incarcerated youth, coming-of-age and Black male identity are explored in Monster. Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, is set in 1940s Louisiana. Monster is set during the mid-1990s in New York when crime rates were high, the crack cocaine epidemic was devastating, and the war on crime was fierce and unforgiving.