Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She was the second of four children from a working-class, black family.[5] Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. Her father grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15, a group of white people lynched two black businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him."[6] Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. Ramah Wofford was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.[7]

When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not pay the rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness."[8]

Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs.[7][9] Morrison also read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.[10] She became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni.[11] Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.[7]

In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals.[12] It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time.[6] She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. Her master's thesis was titled "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated."[13] She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955-1957, then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.[9][14]

After her divorce in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor, for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House,[7] in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.[15][16]

In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard.[7] She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers,[7] including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton[17] and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered. She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas,[18] a little-known novelist and poet who in 1968 had been shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City Subway.[6][19]

Among other books Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and other documents of black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s.[6] Random House had been uncertain about the project, but received good reviews. Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children—books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."[7]

Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children alone.[14]

Morrison's portrait on the first-edition dust jacket of The Bluest Eye (1970)

The Bluest Eye was published (by Holt, Rinehart and Winston) in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39.[16] It was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry ... But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music."[20] The novel did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new black-studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales.[21] The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House. Gottlieb later edited most of Morrison's novels.[21]

In 1975, Morrison's second novel Sula (1973), about a friendship between two black women, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage through the magic of the Black experience. This novel brought her national acclaim, being a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940.[22] Song of Solomon also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.[23]

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.[24]

Morrison gave her next novel, Tar Baby (1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being black.[25]

In 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, while living in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York.[26][27] She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus.[28] In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, SUNY.[29]

Morrison's first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder by white men of black teenager Emmett Till. The play was performed in 1986, at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time.[30] Morrison was also a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.[31]

In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner,[32] whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself.[33] Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.[34]

Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is "so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate."[35] Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Times, "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest."[36]

Not all critics praised Beloved, however. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic[37] that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries," and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials."[38][39]

Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight black critics and writers,[40][41] among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988.[16][42][43] "Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve," they wrote.[6] Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[35] It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.[44]

Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy.[45] Morrison said that they are intended to be read together, explaining, "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."[8] The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. That year she also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in white American literature.[44]

Before Morrison published the third novel of the trilogy, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her citation reads that she, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."[46] She was the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize.[47]

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, "Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? ... Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story."[48]

In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."[49] Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations,"[50] began with the aphorism: "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.[51] Morrison was also honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."[52]

The third novel of her Beloved trilogy, Paradise, about citizens of an all-black town, came out in 1997. The next year, Morrison was on the cover of Time magazine, making her only the second female writer of fiction and second black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.[53]

Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of Beloved was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe, alongside Danny Glover as Sethe's lover, Paul D, and Thandie Newton as Beloved.[54]

The movie flopped at the box office. A review in The Economist suggested that "most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape and slavery."[55] Film critic Janet Maslin, however, in her review "No Peace from a Brutal Legacy" called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. ... Its linchpin is of course Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together."[56]

In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show.[57] An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments.[58] As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies.[7] John Young wrote in the African American Review in 2001, that Morrison's career experienced the boost of "The Oprah Effect, ... enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience."[59]

Winfrey selected a total of four of Morrison's novels over six years, giving Morrison's novels a bigger sales boost than they got from her Nobel Prize win in 1993.[60] The novelist also appeared three times on Winfrey's show. Winfrey said, "For all those who asked the question 'Toni Morrison again?'... I say with certainty there would have been no Oprah's Book Club if this woman had not chosen to share her love of words with the world."[58] Morrison called the book club a "reading revolution."[58]

Morrison continued to explore new art forms when she returned to Margaret Garner's life story, the basis of her novel Beloved, to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner. Completed in 2002, with music by Richard Danielpour, the opera was premièred on May 7, 2005, at the Detroit Opera House with Denyce Graves in the title role.[61] Meanwhile, Love, her first novel since Paradise, came out in 2003. In 2004, Morrison put together a children's book called Remember to mark the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional.[62]

From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.[63]

In June 2005, the University of Oxford awarded Morrison an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.[64] In the fall of that year, Morrison visited the Louvre museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home."[65]

In 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years, as chosen by a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors.[66] In his essay about the choice, "In Search of the Best," critic A. O. Scott said: "Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, 'Beloved' has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain."[67]

Morrison's novel A Mercy, released in 2008, is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682. Diane Johnson, in her review in Vanity Fair, called A Mercy "a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing tale that captures, in the cradle of our present problems and strains, the natal curse put on us back then by the Indian tribes, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English competing to get their footing in the New World against a hostile landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human experience."[68]

From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University.[10] She said she did not think much of modern fiction writers who reference their own lives instead of inventing new material, and she used to tell her creative writing students, "I don't want to hear about your little life, OK?" Similarly, she chose not to write about her own life in a memoir or autobiography.[12]

Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she conceived and developed the Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together students with writers and performing artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration.[69]

Morrison speaking in 2008

Inspired by her curatorship at the Louvre Museum, Morrison returned to Princeton in fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home."[15]

On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.[70]

In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature, and specifically van Niekerk's 2004 novel Agaat.[71]

Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45.[21][72] Morrison's novel Home (2012) was half-completed when Slade died.[21]

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University–New Brunswick during the commencement ceremony,[73] where she delivered a speech on the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth."

Morrison in 2013

Morrison debuted another work in 2011: She worked with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré on a new production, Desdemona, taking a fresh look at William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nursemaid, Barbary, who is only briefly referenced in Shakespeare. The play, a mix of words, music and song, premiered in Vienna in 2011.[15][12][74]

Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died. She said that afterwards, "I stopped writing until I began to think, He would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop. 'Please, Mom, I'm dead, could you keep going ...?'"[75]

She completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade Morrison.[11][76][77] Published in 2012, it is the story of a Korean War veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s, who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.[78]

In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society,[79] an international literary society founded in 1983, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison's work.[80][81][82]

Morrison's eleventh novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned – a childhood trauma that has dogged Bride her whole life.[83]

Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.[84][62]

Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old.[3][85][86]

Upon her death, Morrison had a net worth of 20 million dollars.[87]

A memorial tribute was held for Morrison on November 21, 2019, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. At this gathering she was eulogized by, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick, Fran Lebowitz, and Edwidge Danticat.[88] The jazz saxophonist David Murray performed a musical tribute.[89]

Street art depicting Morrison in Vitoria, Spain.

Morrison was not afraid to comment on American politics and race relations.

In writing about the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, she claimed that, since Whitewater, Bill Clinton was being mistreated in the same way black people often are:

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.[90]

The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters. When the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its dinner in Washington, D.C. on September 29, 2001, for instance, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the chair, told the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president."[91]

In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to Time magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race."[92] In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton,[93] though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.[94] When he won, Morrison said she felt like an American for the first time. She said, "I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama. I felt like a kid."[11]

In April 2015, speaking of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott — three unarmed black men killed by white police officers — Morrison said: "People keep saying, 'We need to have a conversation about race.' This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, 'Is it over?', I will say yes."[95]

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Morrison wrote an essay, "Mourning for Whiteness," published in the November 21, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. In it she argues that white Americans are so afraid of losing privileges afforded them by their race that white voters elected Trump, whom she described as being "endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan" in order to keep the idea of white supremacy alive.[96][97]

Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison did not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview, "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book — leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity."[98] She went on to state that she thought it "off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things."[98]

In 2012, she responded to a question about the difference between black and white feminists in the 1970s. "Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves," she explained. "They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed."[78]

W. S. Kottiswari writes in Postmodern Feminist Writers (2008) that Morrison exemplifies characteristics of "postmodern feminism" by "altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians" and by her usage of shifting narration in Beloved and Paradise. Kottiswari states: "Instead of western logocentric abstractions, Morrison prefers the powerful vivid language of women of color ... She is essentially postmodern since her approach to myth and folklore is re-visionist."[99]

A quote from Toni Morrison at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, includes writing by Morrison.[100] Visitors can see her quote after they have walked through the section commemorating individual victims of lynching.[101]

The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.[102][103] Morrison's decision to offer her papers to Princeton instead of to her alma mater Howard University was criticized by some within the historically black colleges and universities community.[104]

In 2019 legislation was introduced in Morrison's hometown Lorain, Ohio, to officially recognize February 18, her birthday, as "Toni Morrison Day".[105][106][107]

• 1975: Ohioana Book Award for Sula[118]
• 1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon[119]
• 1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award[120]
• 1987–88: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award[121]
• 1988: Helmerich Award[122]
• 1988: American Book Award for Beloved[123]
• 1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved[124]
• 1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved[35]
• 1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved[125][lower-alpha 1]
• 1988: Ohioana Career Medal for contributions to education, literature, and the humanities[118]
• 1988: Honorary Doctor of Laws at University of Pennsylvania[128][129]
• 1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University[130]
• 1993: Nobel Prize in Literature[131]
• 1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris[102]
• 1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris[132]
• 1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature[133]
• 1996: Jefferson Lecture[134]
• 1996: National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters[135]
• 1997: Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Gustavus Adolphus College.[136]
• 2000: National Humanities Medal[137]
• 2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante[138]
• 2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of Oxford[139]
• 2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee[140]
• 2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement[141]
• 2010: Officier de la Légion d'Honneur[142]
• 2010: Institute for Arts and Humanities Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities from the Pennsylvania State University[143]
• 2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction[144]
• 2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement[145]
• 2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva[146][147]
• 2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom[148]
• 2013: The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University[149]
• 2013: Honorary Doctorate of Literature awarded by Princeton University[150]
• 2013: PEN Oakland - Josephine Miles Literary Award for Home[151]
• 2013: Writer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome[152]
• 2014: Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle[153][154]
• 2016: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction[155][156]
• 2016: The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University[157]
• 2016: The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by the MacDowell Colony[158]
• 2018: The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society[159]

• Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children (2008) – Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?[160]

• The Bluest Eye. 1970. ISBN 0-452-28706-5.
• Sula. 1973. ISBN 1-4000-3343-8.
• Song of Solomon. 1977. ISBN 1-4000-3342-X.
• Tar Baby. 1981. ISBN 1-4000-3344-6.
• Beloved. 1987. ISBN 1-4000-3341-1.
• Jazz. 1992. ISBN 1-4000-7621-8.
• Paradise. 1997. ISBN 0-679-43374-0.
• Love. 2003. ISBN 0-375-40944-0.
• A Mercy. 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7.
• Home. 2012. ISBN 978-0307594167.
• God Help the Child. 2015. ISBN 978-0307594174.

• The Big Box (1999). ISBN 9780786823642.
• The Book of Mean People (2002). ISBN 9780786805402.
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004). ISBN 9780618397402.
• Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (2007). ISBN 9780743283915.
• Peeny Butter Fudge (2009). ISBN 9781442459007.
• Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010). ISBN 1416985239.
• Please, Louise (2014). ISBN 9781416983385.

• "Recitatif" (1983)[161]
• "Sweetness". The New Yorker. 90 (47): 58–61. February 9, 2015.

• Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)[30]
• Desdemona (first performed May 15, 2011, in Vienna)[162][163][164]

• Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)[3]

• Morrison, Toni (2009). "Foreword". In Harris, Middleton A.; Levitt, Morris; Furman, Roger; Smith, Ernest (eds.). The Black Book. Random House. ISBN 9781400068487.
• Editor (July 24, 2007). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 9780307388636.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
• Editor and foreword (1992). Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Pantheon Books. ISBN 9780679741459.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
• Co-editor (1997), Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. ISBN 9780307482266.
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004). ISBN 9780618397402.
• What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008). ISBN 9781604730173.
• Editor (2009), Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word. ISBN 9780061878817.
• The Origin of Others – The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures; Foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017). Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674976450.
• The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 9780525521037. UK edition published as Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019), London: Chatto & Windus, ISBN 978-1784742850.

• "Introduction." Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. [1885] The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxxii–xli.