Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, the town where her first novel is set. She graduated from Howard University in 1953 and in the late 1960s became the first Black woman to serve as a fiction editor at Random House in New York, while writing her own books. The Bluest Eye (1970) follows Pecola, a young Black girl in Lorain; Sula (1973) traces the friendship of two girls, Sula and Nel, in a Black community in Ohio; and Song of Solomon (1977), about Macon 'Milkman' Dead III's search for his family's past, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and brought her national attention.

Beloved (1987) was inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped, was pursued, and killed her two-year-old daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Her later novels include Jazz (1992), Paradise, A Mercy (2008), set in colonial America in the late 17th century, and Home. She died in 2019.

Start with Sula or Song of Solomon rather than Beloved. Beloved is her most celebrated book, but its story of a formerly enslaved family in a haunted Cincinnati house is demanding as a first encounter. Sula is short and tightly focused on one friendship; Song of Solomon is longer, with a search-for-roots plot that carries the reader forward.

After either, read Beloved, then go back to The Bluest Eye to see where she began. Readers who want her later work should try A Mercy, a novel set before the United States existed, which approaches slavery from a different angle than Beloved.