Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,124

This is the grave of Toni Morrison. Or it might just be a monument in a cemetery to Morrison, I’m not exactly sure. But hey, it’s my series so this is close enough, plus we get to talk about one of the finest authors in American history.

Born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Chloe Wofford grew up in a working class family, the daughter of a man who had witnessed a lynching as a child in Georgia and despised white people the rest of his life. When she was 2, the family couldn’t pay rent. Their landlord responded by setting the house on fire with all of their stuff in it. They laughed in his face. Literally. This was a major influence on her. In fact, she often credited her family’s resilience in the face of their many hard times as critically important to her development, including the many stories of survival told orally that she heard through her childhood.

Wofford did great in school, read like crazy, and started at Howard in 1949. It was in Washington that she first encountered de jure segregation and it shocked her as it does so many people. At Howard though, there were critically important figures of black intellectual life, such as Alain Locke and Sterling Brown. She took courses from these legends. She was involved in theater and the student group went on tour in the South, so she really saw what southern life was like. She did a master’s degree and then got a job teaching at Texas Southern University, an HBCU in that state, before returning to Howard to teach for several years. She married a man named Harold Morrison, an architect, in 1958. They divorced in 1964, but she kept his name for her soon to be famous literary career.

Morrison had to support herself and didn’t really want to teach anymore. So she got a job as an editor for Random House. That started as editing textbooks, but in 1967, she started editing fiction and acquiring books. Her role as an editor is underrated. She was critical in bringing a lot of black literature of the era to print. One was Nettie Jones’ Fish Tales, the ribald chronicle of a sexual liberated if mentally disturbed woman that was reprinted to great fanfare a couple of years ago. She brought Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe into the American market. She published Angela Davis. She organized and published a lot of anthologies of black literature and other art. I mean, she’s a critically important editor in American history, even if she never wrote anything on her own.

But she did start publishing on her own and that made her among the most important writers in American history. She started joining local writing groups in Washington, where she was still based. She brought in a short story once. People liked it. It became The Bluest Eye, her debut novel, published in 1970. It didn’t initally sell that many copies but it spread through its inclusion on a lot of college campuses in the new Black Studies departments (or similarly named departments) that were opening in schools around the nation. This was a crazy era–one when reading fiction was something people did instead of rotting their brains online and when writing fiction could change the world. After this, Robert Gottlieb became Morrison’s personal editor and a star was soon born.

Morrison followed with Sula in 1973 and the brilliant Song of Solomon in 1977. The latter is to me one of the greatest books in American literature. Her work was literature in its purest form but it was also such deep discussions and explorations of identity, history, and politics without being explicitly political. It was America in a nutshell. Along with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this has a case to be the Great American Novel, in my view. Amazingly, Song of Solomon was the first novel by a black author featured by the Book of the Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son, all the way back in 1940.

Tar Baby came next, also highly acclaimed. It was only at this point, in 1983, that Morrison decided to quit editing. She had continued to work at Random House all the way until then because she just wasn’t sure about her income. I don’t blame anyone for that! Kind of amazing though that this astonishing already legend of American fiction still felt the need to do the daily labor necessary to survive for that long. She would occasionally teach though, which she enjoyed from time to time.

Then in 1987 came Beloved, which, well the title describes the book’s reception. It was universally accepted and was on top the best seller lists for a half year, and that back in an era when Americans didn’t waste their precious lives away on social media and so actually ingested material dedicated to making them better humans. That fact that old grump cultural conservative Stanley Crouch was the one major reviewer to hate it and much of Morrison only demonstrates that it’s good to have the right enemies. She also had the right allies. The fact that the book did not win the major book awards caused most of teh black writing establishment to rise up in protest and shortly after that, Morrison won the Pulitzer. Then she wrote Jazz in 1992 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, an amazing achievement, especially because she was seen as still mid-career, although in truth she was past that. Well deserved, without a doubt.

Oprah Winfrey unsurprisingly was a huge fan. She wanted to adapt Beloved as a movie. Jonathan Demme directed it and Oprah starred. It wasn’t very good. But Oprah had another tool–her new book club. She featured Song of Solomon in 1996 and that sent sales through the roof. A few years later, Oprah selected The Bluest Eye. Morrison sold a mere 800,000 new copies of that old book because of this. Unlike that stupid arrogant white male asshole Jonathan Franzen, Morrison embraced Oprah’s Book Club and called it a “revolution in reading.” Indeed it was.

Morrison’s writing rate slowed down after this. She published a couple more books, including 2006’s A Mercy, before officially retiring in 2008. But she was still giving lectures, winning awards, teaching, and doing whatever she wanted for the rest of her life. Plus she didn’t really retire and published Home in 2012 and God Bless the Child in 2015.

Morrison died in 2019. She was 88. Pneumonia was the cause.

Toni Morrison is buried or is not buried in South View Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other American writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ernest Gaines is in Oscar, Louisiana and Walker Percy is in St. Benedict, Louisiana. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.