Toni Morrison

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Morrison’s Early Years

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 1-23

3. Song of Solomon: One Beginning of Morrison’s Career

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 24-43

4. Tar Baby and Other Folktales

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 44-59

5. Beloved, Beloved, Beloved

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 60-79

6. Jazz and Morrison’s Trilogy: New York in the 1920s

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 80-98

7. Morrison as Public Intellectual

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 99-116

8. The Nobel Prize in Literature and Morrison’s Trilogy

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 117-134

9. Morrison and the Twenty-first Century: Love

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 135-147

10. Morrison and Various Mercies

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 148-161

11. Morrison and the Definitions of Home

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 162-177

12. Coda

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 178-180

13. Back Matter

    Pages 181-217

    PDF

A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.

• Morrison
• African American
• African
• fiction
• public intellectual
• women
• motherhood
• quest
• The Bluest Eye
• Sula
• Song of Solomon
• Tar Baby
• Beloved
• Jazz
• Paradise
• Love
• A Mercy
• Home
• The Black Book
• history
• New York
• novel
• Virginia Woolf
• William Faulkner

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Rockefeller awardee, and a resident at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Bunting Institute. She recently received the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service to American literature. Her 2013 A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present is her 53rd book. She has written two other books for this series, one on Ernest Hemingway and the other, in both 1999 and 2003, on Sylvia Plath. She writes widely on twentieth-century American literature, biography, women's writing and pedagogy. Her publications include A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2000), William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism (2002), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (2009).

Policies and ethics