Portrait of Toni Morrison
Meet the Author

Toni Morrison

American · 1931–2019 · Novelist and editor

Portrait: John Mathew Smith (celebrity-photos.com), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

An Ohio-born novelist and longtime book editor whose fiction gives Black American history an inner life, and who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.

2 StoryBites Editions2 Big Books
Start with Song of Solomon → Browse the editions

Why read Toni Morrison?

Song of Solomon follows Milkman Dead, a young man from a Michigan city, as a hunt for his family’s rumored gold turns into a search for his family’s past in the South. Beloved is set in Ohio after the Civil War, where Sethe, who escaped slavery, lives in a house haunted by the daughter she killed rather than see her taken back, until a young woman arrives who may be that daughter returned. Both novels move back and forth in time and let memory arrive in pieces, so read slowly and expect the whole story only near the end. Song of Solomon is the easier way in, with a quest to hold onto; Beloved is among her most demanding books and among her most widely taught.

A life in six dates

  1. 1931Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio
  2. 1953Graduates from Howard University
  3. 1970Publishes her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while working as an editor at Random House
  4. 1977Publishes Song of Solomon, which wins the National Book Critics Circle Award
  5. 1987Publishes Beloved
  6. 1988Beloved wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  7. 1993Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
  8. 2019Dies in New York

Themes across the collection

NovelsAmerican literatureComing-of-ageRace and identityFamily historyMyth and folkloreHistorical fictionSlaveryMemory and trauma

The StoryBites Editions

Context that actually matters

Margaret GarnerIn 1856 Garner escaped slavery in Kentucky with her family and crossed into Ohio, and when slave catchers cornered them she killed her young daughter rather than see her returned. Morrison drew on the case for Beloved.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850The law required free states to help return people who had escaped slavery, which is why crossing the Ohio River did not make Sethe safe.
The flying AfricansBlack folklore, especially along the Georgia and South Carolina coast, told of enslaved Africans who flew home to Africa, and Song of Solomon builds its ending on that story.