Removals addresses the relationship between the national debates on the establishment of a federal Indian policy in the first half of the nineteenth century and the simultaneous debates on the establishment of an unofficial policy governing the production of an American literature. Maddox rereads the work of writers including Herman Melville, Catherine Sedgewick, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Francis Parkman within the context of the public debates on `the Indian question' in order to illustrate the ways in which they respond to the political, social, and aesthetic issues raised by these debates.