True to its title, Jazz (1992), offers varying strains of melody as it weaves together the sad and happy lives of a handful of people in 1920s Harlem. In 1998 Beloved was made into a widely-acclaimed major motion picture directed by Jonathan Demme, and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. The details of Sethe's hard life and the story behind the scar that spreads across her back like a tree, are excruciating to read, yet in Morrison's careful hands the truth unfurls like a bright and horrible flower. With Beloved (1987) came the Pulitzer Prize, and a deeper evocation of the cruelties committed in the name of slavery. Set in the Caribbean, New York City, and a small Florida town, the novel pulses with the different rhythms of each of its milieus as it sets forth provocative questions about racial and sexual inequality. In Tar Baby (1981), Morrison takes a contemporary approach to the conflicts between white and black, and between men and women. Monumental in scope, and peopled with characters as unforgettable as any in modern fiction, the novel reaches backward from generation to generation as it unravels its litany of heroism and cruelty, romance and hatred, freedom and bondage.

In Song of Solomon (1977), Morrison looks to the Bible and ancient mythology to tell the story of a young man's quest to learn the secrets of his past. Nominated for the National Book Award, her next novel, Sula (1973), immediately established Morrison as a superb portrayer of women as individuals with fierce passions, hatreds, and enormous capacities for love and forgiveness. The tragedy of Pecola Breedlove's unhappy life echoes the issues of racial beauty and pride that fueled so much of the 1960s civil rights movement. Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was set in the author's own home town and tells of a young black girl's painful yearning for acceptance and love as she prays for the blue eyes of a white girl. Ultimately, Paradise teaches us that intolerance, like justice, is blind to race, and that it is in communication, not isolation, that will we find heaven on earth. The apocalyptic assault that ensues is the result of bigotry and intolerance as fierce as any encountered by Ruby's past generations. Inevitably, Ruby will show signs that it is a thriving, not a dying community, and the attendant signs of movement - both negative and positive - are read as evil inflicted upon Ruby by a community of women who are the inhabitants of a decrepit convent on the outskirts of town. But despite their best efforts, Ruby's founding fathers cannot keep out the forces that move all societies forward: change, rebellion, passion, and death.

Morrison's most recent novel, Paradise, is a haunting portrait of Ruby, Oklahoma, an all-black town founded by a small group of families hoping to protect themselves from the hatred and sin that plagued their ancestors. But she does not let us off easy, for each of Toni Morrison's novels contains brutal facts of inhumanity and injustice.Īlthough America's history of racism and slavery is central to Morrison's body of work, her novels transcend these issues to envelop truths about the human condition, the problems we all face. Conversations are slow and easy, punctuated with the lyrical vernacular of the early South. Ghosts, spirits, mythic characters, and magical events drift through her novels as memory suffuses with the present. Reading a Toni Morrison novel is like sitting through a history lesson delivered by an ancient storyteller. This accessibility is perhaps her greatest gift to her readers, for she presents hard truths and historical fact without didacticism or condescension. Cited by many as our greatest living writer, Morrison continues to produce works of highly-accessible fiction that are of literary and social significance. The recipient of the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and of awards from the National Book Critic Circle and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she has also won the Pulitzer Prize, and was the first African-American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Reading Guides for The Bluest Eye and Paradiseįew writers have been as celebrated or influential as Toni Morrison.

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