Decades after W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903 described the painful African American double consciousness, a cluster of critics transformed it into what Michael G. Cooke calls "The paradoxically favorable environment of suffering". From Behind the Veil, by Robert B. Stepto, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, by Houston A. Baker, Jr., and The Signifying Monkey, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., are all grounded in the creative possibilities in the double consciousness that Du Bois defined in The Souls of Black Folk.