Song of Solomon » (Reprint)

Few contemporary novelists have achieved the venerated status of Toni Morrison. She has written adored modern classics like Beloved and Song of Solomon that daringly blend the supernatural and the natural with an uncommonly poetic eloquence. She is a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Noble Prize for Literature, and is truly one of America s most gifted storytellers.

Toni Morrison (b.1931) is perhaps the most celebrated contemporary American novelist. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Morrison powerfully evokes in her fiction the legacies of displacement and slavery that have been bequeathed to the African-American community. Morrison was born in Ohio, educated at Howard University and Cornell University, and is now a member of the faculty of Princeton University. Her most widely read novel is perhaps Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently adapted for film. Song of Solomon (1977), however, is perhaps the most lyrical of her novels, following Milkman Dead as he struggles to understand his family history and the ways in which that history has both been damaged by and transcended the horror of slavery. All of Morrison's fiction, from her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), to last year's Paradise (1998), explores both the need for and the impossibility of real community and the bonds that both unite and divide African-American women. Morrison has also published a volume of critical work entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

Reynolds Price

The [novel's] purpose seems to be communication of painfully discovered and powerfully held convictions about the possibility of transcendence within human life . . . .The end is unresolved. Does Milkman survive[?] . . . .Few Americans . . .can say more than she has in this wise and spacious novel. —The New York TimesSeptember 111977