The literature of black America repeatedly reflects a native rootlessness and its creators' yearning for a home. The black writer settles his work in an ethos, which has evolved from an older African heritage, primarily in response to an omnipresent white society. In this document, one of these ethnic expressions--the blues--is examined as a means of exploring American Negro literature in general. The blues form a body of significant poems and, transmuted, they become the symbolic basis of such complex works as Richard Wright's "Black Boy" and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." In formal terms, the blues are typically a 12 bar, three line stanza--the first two lines repeated, but linked in content and rhyme with the third. (CK)