Toni Morrison

Before she was a novelist, Toni Morrison was an editor. In the late 1960s the daughter of an Ohio welder became the first Black woman fiction editor at Random House in New York, where she published Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara and Muhammad Ali’s autobiography.

She wrote on the side, getting up at 4 a.m. while raising two sons on her own. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), grew out of a short story about a Black girl who wants blue eyes. It sold poorly until colleges started putting it on their reading lists.

Beloved (1987) was the turning point. While compiling The Black Book, an anthology of Black American life, Morrison had come across the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped, was caught, and killed her two-year-old daughter rather than see her taken back into slavery. In the novel, the dead child comes back to haunt her mother’s house. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and five years later Morrison became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Start with Beloved, and don’t expect to catch everything at once: the story arrives in pieces and the past surfaces slowly. If you want something shorter, Sula (1973) follows the friendship between two Black women. Toni Morrison died in 2019.