It is clear that philosophers are interested in what it means to be a person. But it is less obvious that this question presses at literary and artistic works with enormous force. In this introduction, I am interested in how literature and art pose this longest-standing question: What are we? How do literature and art—like philosophy—speculate about what it means to be a person? For writers and artists are natural ontologists, invisible or secret thinkers. Yet it is important that the interpretive encounters I stage at no point yield or give up a theory of the person. What this book stages, instead, is a diverse collection of readings in which the literary or artistic text itself organizes thinking about what a person is. For without giving us abstract propositions about people, literary and artistic works posit, in various ways, what a person can be. Literature and art are a natural ground for thinking through such questions about what we are. My case studies in this introduction—works by Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Henri Matisse, Virginia Woolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop—bring the central questions of this book to life.