friends, Sula Peace and Nel Wright. Growing up in
the African-American section of a southern Ohio
town, their intimate friendship as girls is severed
when Sula, like her grandmother and mother,
chooses a nonconforming life, while Nel, like her
mother, opts for respectability and conformity. As
their lives span the middle decades of the 20th cen-
tury, Morrison delineates many of the economic,
social, and psychological issues that confront
African-Americans.
Song of Solomon (1977), winner of the National
Book Critics’ Circle Award, is more ambitious,
and with it Morrison’s status as one of the lead-
ing contemporary fiction writers in America was
firmly established. In Part I, its central character,
Milkman Dead, struggles to attain a meaning-
ful identity amidst familial and societal tensions,
much like Pecola, Claudia, Sula, and Nel. In Part
II, he travels from the North to the South, at first
in search of a cache of gold, but his search be-
comes a heroic quest for his ancestral past, his cul-
tural heritage, and his rightful identity. The two
protagonists, of Morrison’s fourth novel, Tar Baby
(1981), Jadine Childs and Son, attempt unsuccess-
fully to pair up. Neither the Caribbean mansion
of Jadine’s white patron nor Son’s hometown in
rural Florida nor the glitz of New York City pro-
vides a hospitable setting for them. Compared
with Morrison’s other novels, this one received
less praise and less critical attention.
Morrison’s best-known novel, BELOVED (1987),
won the Pulitzer Prize. The central character is
Sethe Garner, who in 1855 escapes slavery to
freedom in Cincinnati. When her former owner
comes to reclaim her and her four children, she
kills one of them, Beloved, and tries to kill the
others rather than see them returned to slavery.
Most of the novel occurs in 1873, when Sethe; her
surviving daughter, Denver; and another former
slave, PAU L D, try painfully to live with the nearly
fatal effects of the slave past, including the myste-
rious presence of a young woman who claims to
be named Beloved.
Beloved was followed by Jazz in 1992. The main
plot of this novel is the story of Joe and Violet
Trace, who migrate from Virginia to New York in
the 1920s. Thrilled by the excitement and relative
prosperity of their life there, they nevertheless
endure debilitating identity problems, centered
on Violet’s lack of a child and on Joe’s ignorance
about his mother. In 1993 Morrison won the Nobel
Prize in literature, and her acceptance speech was
published that year. Paradise (1998), Morrison’s
third novel in what she has called a trilogy on the
subject of love, recounts the history of an all-black
town in rural Oklahoma and the tragic confron-
tation between some of the male leaders of that
town and a group of socially outcast women liv-
ing nearby. In 2003, Morrison’s eighth novel, Love,
was published.
In addition to her novels, Morrison has pub-
lished a play, Dreaming Emmett (1985); a short
story, “Recitativ” (1982); a book of literary criti-
cism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (1992); several essays on Af-
rican-American and American culture; and several
children’s books coauthored with her son Slade.
She has also edited two volumes of essays: Race-
ing Justice and Engendering Power (1992) on the
Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings and Birth of
a Nation’hood (1997) on the O. J. Simpson trial.
As indicated by the prizes and honors Morrison
has accumulated, she has achieved phenomenal
literary success—both popular and critical. Critics
have examined her works, especially Song of Solo-
mon and Beloved, from a multitude of perspectives
and have enthusiastically praised her fiction and
her role as a public intellectual. She regularly gives
readings of her own works and insightful lectures
throughout the country and the world. She has
also collaborated with renowned musicians, such
as Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, and Andre
Previn, in various compositions, including a new
opera based on Margaret Garner, the historical
prototype for Sethe.
In the broadest terms, Morrison’s novels have
propelled her to the heights of her profession be-
cause they unflinchingly address issues that are
close to the heart, not only of African Americans’
experience or all Americans’ experience but also,
more broadly, of human experience. They deeply
satisfy readers in their bold examinations of theMorrison, Toni 367