The Essential Works of Toni Morrison

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison left behind a legacy of powerful books. These are her most essential listens.

Liberty Hardy

May 8, 2020

In August 2019, we lost a giant of the literary world. Toni Morrison died at the age of 88, leaving behind a decades-long legacy of remarkable writing and achievements. She was one of a few American authors whose work has had an indelible impact on readers and writers everywhere. Toni Morrison’s books are essential listening for anyone who wants to study American literature or experience books filled with powerful storytelling and brilliant prose.

Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, on February 18, 1931. She received a BA in English from Howard University and earned a master's in American Literature from Cornell University. Morrison became the first Black female fiction editor at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. In 1970, her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, was published to great acclaim, leading to a long and illustrious career as a writer and teacher.

In her lifetime, Morrison wrote 11 novels, nine works of nonfiction, five children’s books, two short stories, and two plays. Morrison’s writing is evocative and fluid: a combination of memories, details, and history. The result is a poetic prose that explores heavy-hitting subjects such as slavery, racism, and abuse in an almost ethereal manner. Her works are both hypnotic and grounding. Morrison is one of only a dozen American citizens to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is awarded for an author’s body of work. She is the only African American woman to have won the prize.

One of Morrison's novels, Song of Solomon, was among Oprah Winfrey’s first book club picks; another, Beloved, was made into a feature film starring Winfrey in 1998. Winfrey went on to select more of Morrison’s novels for her book club, sending a few of them back to the best seller list.

Throughout her career, Morrison received a tremendous number of awards and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University. President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and her home state of Ohio recently passed legislation to recognize February 18 as Toni Morrison Day.

With an author as revered and adored as Toni Morrison, it’s hard to know where to start. And as with most authors, deciding which book is best is a subjective process. But combining accolades and reviews, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of her essential works. A fact worth noting: Morrison is the fact that she narrated almost every single one of her audiobooks herself. Listening to her low, rich voice provides the added significance of knowing exactly which tone the author intended her work to take.

Liberty Hardy is a Book Riot senior contributing editor, co-host of All the Books, a Book of the Month judge, and above all else, a ravenous reader. She resides in Maine with her cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon.

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The Essential Works of Toni Morrison

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison left behind a legacy of powerful books. These are her most essential listens.

Liberty Hardy

May 8, 2020

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison

When you're just discovering an author whose career is as esteemed as Toni Morrison's, we always suggest starting with their first novel. Morrison's debut evolved from a short story she wrote in the 1960s during her time teaching at Howard University. The story is set in Morrison's own hometown of Lorain, and shows the inherent racism in standards of beauty.

The novel follows a young African American girl named Pecola Breedlove, who grows up in the years following the Great Depression. Because of her dark skin and mannerisms, she is repeatedly labeled as ugly and unloved. As a result of the demeaning bullying she endures, she believes blue eyes are the highest form of beauty, so she prays that someday she, too, will have blue eyes.

The novel is told from the perspectives of various people in Pecola's life, including Claudia MacTeer, the daughter of Pecola's foster parents, and an omniscient third-person narrator. It explores the trauma Pecola suffers as a result of her inferiority complex, and how the whole town uses her as a scapegoat for their own miseries. Because of the novel's serious subject matter, there have been numerous attempts to ban the novel from schools and libraries.

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Sula

Toni Morrison

Morrison did not suffer from the sophomore slump with her second novel. Set in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, Sula is a powerful examination of friendship and societal conventions. It follows two young women, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who grow up together in the Black neighborhood of Bottom. The two girls are the closest of friends, despite having different backgrounds. Nel is being raised by conservative parents, while Sula's childhood with her unpredictable mother and grandmother is fraught with instability and tragedy. Nel marries right out of high school, and Sula disappears from town shortly after the wedding. When she returns to Bottom 10 years later, she becomes the town pariah because of her disregard for societal constraints.

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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison

If you have to absolutely choose Morrison's best book, it might just be a tie between this one and Beloved. In her stunning third novel, Morrison takes readers through the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, an African American man who resides in Michigan. Milkman grows up during turbulent times in the 1930s, with racial injustices all around. When he gets older, he leaves his Rust Belt city and strikes out for the South to learn about his family's roots. The Nobel Prize committee specifically cited this novel when they awarded Morrison the prize for literature.

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Beloved

Toni Morrison

This is widely considered to be Toni Morrison's greatest novel: partly because it won a Pulitzer, partly because of its film adaptation, and partly because it is indeed incredible. It is an unflinching look at the horrors of slavery. Sethe is an escaped slave living in Ohio with her daughter after her teenage sons have run away. She believes they fled because of a malevolent spirit that inhabits their home, which she knows to be the ghost of her dead baby, who is buried in a grave with a tombstone that only reads 'Beloved.'

Beloved's narration takes readers through Sethe's life and looks at the repercussions of slavery in a terrifying and important story. Morrison was inspired to write the novel after hearing the story of Margaret Garner, an African American who escaped slavery by crossing the Ohio River to Ohio. When she was recaptured, she killed her child rather than have her taken back into slavery.

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Jazz

Toni Morrison

This is the second book (after Beloved) in Morrison's Dantesque trilogy on African American history. It is set mostly in Harlem during the Jazz Age of the 1920s. It differs from her earlier works, in that it follows a structure based on jazz music, with many of the chapters comprising solo compositions. It also features unreliable narrators, letting readers see events from different perspectives. At its heart, Jazz is a tragedy about a door-to-door cosmetics salesman who kills his teenage lover, and his distraught wife, who attacks the girl in her casket at her funeral. It is a novel about love, obsession, and betrayal, whose passions swell and dip like the notes in a jazz tune.

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Home

Toni Morrison

Home is one of Morrison’s greatest later novels. It's a powerful look at racism in the mid-20th century, featuring an African American Korean War veteran named Frank Money. He's justifiably angry after returning from war wounded to be treated once again as a second-class citizen in a segregated United States. His self-loathing and contempt for his nation grows, but when his ailing sister needs him, he must set aside his own problems to help her. He returns her to the tiny Georgia town where they were raised to care for her, and learns a new lesson about the importance of home.

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The Source of Self-Regard

Toni Morrison

This is the only book on this list that is not narrated by Morrison. It's also the last of her works to be published before she died. This collection of speeches and essays offers searing and moving reflections on important social issues such as female empowerment, racism and the Black Lives Matter movement, money, the press, and equal rights. The book is organized in three parts, and each has a powerful introduction. The first is a prayer for the dead of 9/11, the second is a meditation on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the last is a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin.

These three sections span four decades of Morrison's work, from 1976 to 2013, highlighting the best of her speeches and essays. She discusses a variety of subjects: the importance of protecting artists from an increasing number of threats, intersectionality, human rights, and even her take on the O.J. Simpson trial and the exploitation of tragedy as entertainment. She also shares a rare self-reflective moment and discusses her own creative process.

Toni Morrison lived for nearly nine decades. Still, her death is a tremendous loss for literature and the world. She was eloquent, perceptive, outspoken, uplifting, and brilliant. Fortunately, Morrison leaves behind a large body of work, which will provide strength, inspiration, and wisdom for generations to come.

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