Context
Toni Morrison was born Chloe
Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931,
in Lorrain, Ohio, a steel town on the banks of Lake Erie. Morrison's
parents, George and Rahmah, were children of sharecroppers who migrated
from rural Georgia and Alabama. The second of four children, Morrison
excelled in high school, graduated from Howard University, and received
her master's degree from Cornell. Initially opting for a career
as a teacher and editor, Morrison became an instructor at several
historically black universities and worked for Random House. She
brought writers such as Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara to national
prominence. Morrison married and later divorced a Jamaican architect,
Harold Morrison. The couple had two sons.
Morrison began her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while
she taught at Howard University. It was published to critical acclaim
in 1970. Morrison's second novel, Sula, brought
the young author national recognition as well as a nomination for
the 1975 National Book Award in fiction. Song
of Solomon, Morrison's third novel, was popular with both
critics and readers. In 1978, the novel won
the National Critics Circle Award and the Letters Award. 570,000 paperback
copies are currently in print. Morrison's carreer continued its
meteoric rise, and in 1988 she won a Pulitzer
Prize for her novel Beloved. In 1993,
Toni Morrison joined the exclusive ranks of the world's premier
writers when she became the first African-American woman to win
the Nobel Prize in literature.
Morrison's fiction does not fit well into a single category.
It blends themes of race and class, coming-of-age stories, and mythical and
realistic genres. Some critics classify Morrison as magical realist in
the vein of Gabriel García Márquez. However, others claim that she
is a black classicist, an heir to nineteenth century European novelists
such as Gustave Flaubert and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Finally, other scholars
argue that African-American oral narratives, rather than European
traditions, provide the raw material for her work. Morrison draws
on all of these styles to create a rich tapestry of backgrounds
and experiences for her distinctive characters.
Morrison's biography serves as rich source material for
the literary characters in Song of Solomon. Jake
(also known as Macon Dead I) has experiences similar to those of
Morrison's beloved grandfather, John Solomon Willis. After losing
his land and being forced to become a sharecropper, Willis became
disillusioned by the unfulfilled promises of the Emancipation Proclamation,
Abraham Lincoln's 1865 document freeing black
slaves. The character Heddy may have been modeled after Morrison's
Native American great-grandmother. Guitar is a composite character,
made up of Morrison's family and friends whose lives were destroyed
by racism. Milkman's journey to uncover his roots can be compared
to Morrison's own. Like Milkman's, Morrison's creative life began
after age thirty and has been grounded in the African-American experience.
Toni Morrison has said in interviews that she opposed
desegregation in the early 1960s despite
being aware of its terrible effects. She worried that the excellent
historically black schools and universities would disappear. Morrison
wondered if the treasures of folklore, art, music, and literature
created by the relatively insular African-American community would
disappear once that community became more porous. Accordingly, while Song
of Solomon explores the different experiences of white
people and black people, almost all of the action occurs within
an African-American world, drawing on its vitality for inspiration.
Although the black community provides the setting of Song
of Solomon, the novel's themes are universal. Milkman's
quest toward self-discovery, Macon Jr.'s obsession with wealth,
Pilate's boundless love for others, Ryna's and Hagar's madness from
broken hearts, and Guitar's destructive thirst for revenge are classic
stories that have been told countless times in literatures of all
traditions.
