past in the present, and Black English. The volume also includes a transcript of her
Nobel Prize address and essays on her hometown and on her use of language.
Elisa Schappell, with additional material from Claudia Brodsky Lacour, “A
Writers-at-Work/Paris Review Interview with Toni Morrison,” Paris
Review, 128 (Fall 1993).
Fascinating and wide-ranging interview in which Morrison talks about writing
as a craft, her teaching, her views on many major literary figures, and all of her
novels through Jazz.
Danille Taylor-Guthrie, ed., Conversations with Toni Morrison ( Jackson: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, 1994).
Essential collection of interviews with the author covering 1974 to 1992, just
before she received the Nobel Prize in literature.
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonf iction, edited by Carolyn Denard ( Jack-
son: University Press of Mississippi, 2008).
Twenty-nine of Morrison’s highly influential essays, reviews, and speeches from the
beginning of her career as an author in 1971 to reflections on 9/11 in 2002, includ-
ing the Nobel Prize address and “The Dancing Mind.” The volume is divided into
“Family and History,” “Writers and Writing,” and “Politics and Society.”
Criticism
William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Case-
book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Essential collection of some of the best essays on Beloved published before 1999.
Includes a conversation on the novel among three preeminent African American
scholars: Barbara Christian, Deborah McDowell, and Nellie Y. McKay.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past
and Present (New York: Amistad, 1993).
Offers contemporary reviews and critical articles on all the novels through Jazz
as well as four interviews with Morrison. Essays focusing on Beloved in particular
discuss images of slavery, history and narrative, and the novel’s intertextuality with
slave narratives.
Middleton A. Harris, Morris Levitt, Ernest Smith, and Roger Furman, eds., The
Black Book (New York: Random House, 1974).
A compilation of artifacts from African American history—photographs,
newspaper accounts, bills of sale, advertisements with stereotypical caricatures,
quilts—providing a strong sense of the lived material history of African Ameri-
cans through slavery and years of segregation and oppression.
Denise Heinze, The Dilemma of “Double-Consciousness”: Toni Morrison’s Novels
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).
Accessible and insightful readings of the play of history, race, class, and gender
across several Morrison works; consideration of Beloved includes its dramatization
of family, community, and the supernatural.