Toni Morrison, 1931-2019
Earlier this week we lost one of the essential authors of 20th century America, Toni Morrison. Renowned for her beautiful prose that vividly describes life as an African American woman and the search for Black identity in a country still confronting racism at the turn of the century, Morrison covered subjects including sexual violence against women, the Jazz Age, and life in the post-War South. Her writing style utilizes a fair amount of simile to help the reader relate to the issues she describes in her works, making the writing accessible and easy to read because of her even flow and well-structured wording. While Morrison covers some difficult subject matter, she often does so by incorporating fantasy through magical realism, lending an entertainment level to her novels.
Morrison was the 1993 Nobel Prize winner for literature and has also won a Pulitzer Prize (for Beloved), been inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She spent 17 years as the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University, which renamed West College as Morrison Hall in 2017 and is now the permanent home to the author’s personal papers.
Morrison wrote eleven novels that were published between 1970 and 2015, as well as co-wrote five children’s books with her son Slade. She also authored two plays, short stories and some non-fiction. Below are a list of her novels, with a short description from our library catalog, as well as a list of her children’s books with Slade Morrison.
The Bluest Eye (1970)
“The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.”
Sula (1973)
“At the heart of Sula is a bond between to women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injuries. Sula and Nel are both black, both smart, and both poor. Through their girlhood years, they share everything. All this changes when Sula gets out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where there hides a fierce resentment at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.”
Song of Solomon (1977)
“Her third novel's generous expanse reaches across generations of family and miles of land to tell the story of the descendants of Macon Dead, a one time slave who carved a bountiful living out of the Pennsylvania forest, only to be executed by an envious white farmer. Weaving together many of the themes that characterize her work-the relevance of names, the mysteries of the soul and the mind, and the clashing cultures of the North and South--Toni Morrison has, in Song of Solomon, given us a story that is more that a coming-of-age tale. She probes the heart of the dilemma facing many African-Americans struggling to obtain prosperity and independence without severing the ancestral ties that nourish their black identities. But, most importantly, she tells us a story of the human spirit: it's strength, its endurance, and its ability to soar.”
Tar Baby (1981)
“On a tropical island paradise, six people interact with each other in all the tender or hateful ways that human beings are capable of. Rich and poor, black and white, young and old, male and female, each has something to teach the others -- and each has something to learn.”
Beloved (1987)
“Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement. After the Civil War ends, Sethe longingly recalls the two-year-old daughter whom she killed when threatened with recapture after escaping from slavery 18 years before.”
Jazz (1992)
“In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.”
Paradise (1997)
“As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.”
Love (2003)
“May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida–even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is either the void in, or the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces–a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
This audacious exploration into the nature of love–its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread–is rich in characters, striking scenes, and a profound understanding of how alive the past can be.”
A Mercy (2008)
“In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith.”
Home (2012)
“Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood--and his home.”
God Help The Child (2015)
“Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child--the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride's mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that ‘what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.’”
The Big Box (1999)
“Because they do not abide by the rules written by the adults around them, three children are judged unable to handle their freedom and forced to live in a box with three locks on the door.”
The Book of Mean People (2002)
“Toni Morrison's second picture book written with her son, Slade Morrison, offers a humorous look at how children interpret daily events. Sometimes people are mean intentionally, sometimes not. But this wise child, rendered as a delightful cartoon bunny by Pascal Lemaitre, learns how to rise above all meanness in the end.”
Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (2007)
Note: The audio version won Morrison a Grammy for Best Spoken Word for Children
“Three popular tales from Toni and Slade Morrison, Poppy or the Snake? The Lion or the Mouse? and The Ant or the Grasshopper? in one volume. Told with vibrant language and rich in rhythm, these are truly empowering and inspiring tales. Pascal's Lemaitre's ingenious illustrations add sophistication to the Morrison's wry and defiantly ambiguous text, making the Who's Got Game? series a favorite”
Peeny Butter Fudge (2009)
“Children spend the day with their grandmother, who ignores their mother's carefully planned schedule in favor of activities that are much more fun.”
Please, Louise (2014)
“On a gray, rainy day, everything seems particularly frightening and bad to Louise until she enters a library and finds books that help her to know and imagine the beauty and wonder that have been there all along.”
Morrison was the 1993 Nobel Prize winner for literature and has also won a Pulitzer Prize (for Beloved), been inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She spent 17 years as the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University, which renamed West College as Morrison Hall in 2017 and is now the permanent home to the author’s personal papers.
Morrison wrote eleven novels that were published between 1970 and 2015, as well as co-wrote five children’s books with her son Slade. She also authored two plays, short stories and some non-fiction. Below are a list of her novels, with a short description from our library catalog, as well as a list of her children’s books with Slade Morrison.
“The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.”
“At the heart of Sula is a bond between to women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injuries. Sula and Nel are both black, both smart, and both poor. Through their girlhood years, they share everything. All this changes when Sula gets out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where there hides a fierce resentment at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.”
“Her third novel's generous expanse reaches across generations of family and miles of land to tell the story of the descendants of Macon Dead, a one time slave who carved a bountiful living out of the Pennsylvania forest, only to be executed by an envious white farmer. Weaving together many of the themes that characterize her work-the relevance of names, the mysteries of the soul and the mind, and the clashing cultures of the North and South--Toni Morrison has, in Song of Solomon, given us a story that is more that a coming-of-age tale. She probes the heart of the dilemma facing many African-Americans struggling to obtain prosperity and independence without severing the ancestral ties that nourish their black identities. But, most importantly, she tells us a story of the human spirit: it's strength, its endurance, and its ability to soar.”
“On a tropical island paradise, six people interact with each other in all the tender or hateful ways that human beings are capable of. Rich and poor, black and white, young and old, male and female, each has something to teach the others -- and each has something to learn.”
“Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement. After the Civil War ends, Sethe longingly recalls the two-year-old daughter whom she killed when threatened with recapture after escaping from slavery 18 years before.”
“In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.”
“As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.”
“May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida–even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is either the void in, or the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces–a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
This audacious exploration into the nature of love–its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread–is rich in characters, striking scenes, and a profound understanding of how alive the past can be.”
“In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith.”
“Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood--and his home.”
“Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child--the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride's mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that ‘what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.’”
Children’s Books – co-author to Slade Morrison
“Because they do not abide by the rules written by the adults around them, three children are judged unable to handle their freedom and forced to live in a box with three locks on the door.”
“Toni Morrison's second picture book written with her son, Slade Morrison, offers a humorous look at how children interpret daily events. Sometimes people are mean intentionally, sometimes not. But this wise child, rendered as a delightful cartoon bunny by Pascal Lemaitre, learns how to rise above all meanness in the end.”
Note: The audio version won Morrison a Grammy for Best Spoken Word for Children
“Three popular tales from Toni and Slade Morrison, Poppy or the Snake? The Lion or the Mouse? and The Ant or the Grasshopper? in one volume. Told with vibrant language and rich in rhythm, these are truly empowering and inspiring tales. Pascal's Lemaitre's ingenious illustrations add sophistication to the Morrison's wry and defiantly ambiguous text, making the Who's Got Game? series a favorite”
“Children spend the day with their grandmother, who ignores their mother's carefully planned schedule in favor of activities that are much more fun.”
“On a gray, rainy day, everything seems particularly frightening and bad to Louise until she enters a library and finds books that help her to know and imagine the beauty and wonder that have been there all along.”
- Laura N., Information Technology
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