run was modest: two thousand copies in
hardcover. Now a first edition can fetch
upward of six thousand dollars. In 2000,
when “The Bluest Eye” became a selec-
tion for Oprah’s Book Club, Plume sold
more than eight hundred thousand pa-
perback copies. By then, Toni Morrison
had become Toni Morrison—the first
African-American to win the Nobel Prize
in Literature, in 1993. Following “The
Bluest Eye,” Morrison published seven
more novels: “Sula” (1973), “Song of Sol-
omon” (1977), “Tar Baby” (1981), “Beloved”
(1987), “Jazz” (1992), “Paradise” (1998), and
now “Love.” Morrison also wrote a crit-
ical study, “Playing in the Dark: White-
ness and the Literary Imagination” (1992),
which, like all her novels since “Song of
Solomon,” became a best-seller. She has
edited several anthologies—about O.J.,
about the Clarence Thomas hearings—
as well as collections of the writings of
Huey P. Newton and James Baldwin.
With her son Slade, she has co-authored
a number of books for children. She wrote
the book for a musical, “New Orleans”
(1983); a play, “Dreaming Emmett” (1986),
which reimagined the life and death of
Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black
boy who was murdered in Mississippi
in 1955; a song cycle with the composer
André Previn; and, most recently, an opera
based on the life of Margaret Garner, the
slave whose story inspired “Beloved.” She
was an editor at Random House for nine-
teen years—she still reads the Times with
pencil in hand, copy-editing as she goes—
and has been the Robert F. Goheen Pro-
fessor in the Council of the Humanities
at Princeton since 1989.
“I know it seems like a lot,” Morrison
said. “But I really only do one thing. I
read books. I teach books. I write books.
I think about books. It’s one job.” What
Morrison has managed to do with that
job—and the criticism, pro and con, she
has received for doing it—has made her
one of the most widely written-about
American authors of the past fifty years.
(The latest study of her work, she told
me, is a comparison of the vernacular in
her novels and William Faulkner’s. “I
don’t believe it,” I said. “Believe it,” she
said, emphatically.) Morrison—required
reading in high schools across the coun-
try—is almost always treated as a spokes-
woman for her gender and her race. In a
review of “Paradise,” Patricia Storace
wrote, “Toni Morrison is relighting the
angles from which we view American
history, changing the very color of its
shadows, showing whites what they look
like in black mirrors. To read her work is
to witness something unprecedented, an
invitation to a literature to become what
it has claimed to be, a truly American
literature.” It’s a claim that her detractors
would also make, to opposite effect.
“I’m already discredited, I’m already
politicized, before I get out of the gate,”
Morrison said. “I can accept the labels”—
the adjectives like “black” and “female”
that are often attached to her work—“be-
cause being a black woman writer is not
a shallow place but a rich place to write
from. It doesn’t limit my imagination;it expands it. It’s richer than being a
white male writer because I know more
and I’ve experienced more.”
Morrison also owns a home in Prince-
ton, where nine years ago she founded
the Princeton Atelier, a program that
invites writers and performing artists
to workshop student plays, stories, and
music. (Last year, she brought in the
poet Paul Muldoon as a co-director.) “I
don’t write when I’m teaching,” she said.
“Teaching is about taking things apart;
writing is about putting things together.”
She and her sons own an apartment
building farther up the Hudson, which
houses artists, and another building
across the street from it, which her elder
son Ford, an architect, is helping her
remodel into a study and performance
center. “My sister Lois said that the rea-
son I buy all these houses is because we
had to move so often as children,” Mor-
rison said, laughing.
Morrison’s family—the Woffords—
lived in at least six different apartments
over the course of her childhood. One of
them was set on fire by the landlord when
the Woffords couldn’t pay the rent—four
dollars a month. In those days, Toni, the
second of four children (she had two
brothers, now dead), was called Chloe
Ardelia. Her parents, George and Ramah,
like the Breedloves, were originally from
the South (Ramah was born in Green-
ville, Alabama; George in Cartersville,
Georgia). Like many transplanted South-
erners, George worked at U.S. Steel, which
was particularly active during the Sec-
ond World War and attracted not only
American blacks but also displaced Eu-
ropeans: Poles, Greeks, and Italians.
Morrison describes her father as a
perfectionist, someone who was proud
of his work. “I remember my daddy tak-
ing me aside—this was when he worked
as a welder—and telling me that he
welded a perfect seam that day, and that
after welding the perfect seam he put his
initials on it,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy,
no one will ever see that.’ Sheets and
sheets of siding would go over that, you
know? And he said, ‘Yes, but I’ll know
it’s there.’” George also worked odd jobs,
washing cars and the like, after hours at
U.S. Steel. Morrison remembers that he
always had at least two other jobs.
Ramah, a devout member of the Af-
rican Methodist Episcopal Church, was
a homemaker. From the first, it was clear“At this point, I’d forgive any past indiscretions
just for some new stories.”