Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was an editor at Random House who published Black writers for nearly twenty years before her own novels made her the most honoured American writer of her time, with the Pulitzer for Beloved in 1988 and the Nobel in 1993, the first to a Black woman. Song of Solomon follows a man’s search for his family’s past; Beloved, drawn from the case of an escaped slave who killed her child rather than see her returned, is the novel of slavery’s aftermath. She taught at Princeton and wrote in the early mornings, and her prose has the cadence of speech and scripture.