Author Guide · Fiction & Literary Criticism
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Before she published a novel, Toni Morrison edited other people’s. She joined a textbook division of Random House in Syracuse around 1965, moved to the New York office about two years later as its first Black woman senior editor in fiction, and stayed until 1983, publishing writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones and Angela Davis. Her own first novel, The Bluest Eye, appeared in 1970, when she was 39. Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, she went on to write eleven novels about Black American lives, from a farm in the late seventeenth century to the present day. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and in 1993 she became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019, aged 88. This guide covers her eleven key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1970–2015 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Toni Morrison wrote eleven novels. The best known are Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Song of Solomon (1977), The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973). Start with Song of Solomon, the most straightforward of her major novels, then read Beloved. Below: all eleven in order, a reading path, and her essays, plays and children’s books.
Where to Start with Toni Morrison
If you want the best way in
→ Song of Solomon (1977) — a single story told mostly in order, and the novel that made her name.
If you want her defining book
→ Beloved (1987) — the Pulitzer-winning novel of slavery and its aftermath.
If you want something short
→ The Bluest Eye (1970) — her first novel, set in her hometown.
If you want to see where American slavery began
→ A Mercy (2008) — a household in the late seventeenth century.
11 Toni Morrison Books, in Order
The Bluest Eye
Lorain, Ohio, in 1941: Pecola Breedlove, a poor Black girl whom everyone around her calls ugly, prays for blue eyes. Most of the story is told by nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer, in whose family Pecola lives for a while, with other chapters moving into the lives of Pecola’s parents. Her father, Cholly, rapes her, and by the end she has lost her mind. It got little attention at first; Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in 2000, and it is one of the most often challenged books in American schools.
Sula
Sula Peace and Nel Wright grow up together in the Bottom, the Black neighbourhood on a hill above the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel marries and stays; Sula leaves for ten years and comes back to a town that turns against her, especially after Nel’s husband leaves Nel for her. The chapters are headed by year, from 1919 to 1965. It was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Song of Solomon
Macon “Milkman” Dead III grows up comfortable and aimless in a Michigan city. Looking for gold he believes his aunt Pilate hid, he travels to Pennsylvania and then to Shalimar, Virginia, where he finds instead the story of his own family, down to an ancestor who was said to have flown back to Africa. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was the first novel by a Black writer chosen as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940. Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club in 1996.
Tar Baby
On the Caribbean island Isle des Chevaliers, the retired Philadelphia industrialist Valerian Street lives with his wife Margaret and his Black servants Sydney and Ondine Childs. Their niece Jadine, a model with an art history degree from the Sorbonne, is visiting when a fugitive called Son is found hiding in the house. Their affair sets her life among white wealth against his loyalty to his small hometown of Eloe, Florida, and ends with Jadine flying back to Paris.
Beloved
Cincinnati, 1873. Sethe, who escaped slavery on a Kentucky farm called Sweet Home, lives with her daughter Denver in a house haunted by the baby daughter she killed years earlier rather than let her be taken back into slavery; then a young woman calling herself Beloved arrives. Morrison took the idea from the case of Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter in 1856. When it lost the 1987 National Book Award, 48 Black writers and critics protested in The New York Times Book Review; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and in 2006 a New York Times poll of writers and critics named it the best American fiction of the previous 25 years. Jonathan Demme filmed it in 1998, with Oprah Winfrey as Sethe.
Jazz
Harlem in the 1920s. Joe Trace, a middle-aged door-to-door cosmetics salesman, shoots his young lover Dorcas at a party; at the funeral his wife Violet, a hairdresser, attacks the corpse with a knife, then tries to find out who the girl was. An unnamed narrator keeps circling the same events from different angles, and the story reaches back to the South of the nineteenth century. It is the middle book of her trilogy with Beloved and Paradise.
Paradise
It opens in 1976 with the line “They shoot the white girl first”, as nine men from Ruby, an all-Black town in Oklahoma founded by the descendants of freed slaves, attack the Convent, a house seventeen miles away where women with troubled pasts have taken shelter. The novel then goes back through the women’s lives and the town’s history to explain the attack. Morrison never says which woman is white. It completes the trilogy begun with Beloved and was Oprah Winfrey’s book-club pick for January 1998.
Love
Bill Cosey, owner of a once-famous seaside hotel for Black guests, has been dead for years, but he still rules the lives of the women who loved him. His widow Heed and his granddaughter Christine, the same age and once best friends, now share his big house as enemies, fighting over his will. A young drifter called Junior, hired by Heed, brings the story to a head.
A Mercy
Late seventeenth-century America. Jacob Vaark, an orphaned trader with a farm in the north, takes a slave girl, Florens, from a Maryland planter who owes him money. On the farm she lives with his English wife Rebekka and Lina, a Native American woman whose people were killed by smallpox; when the household falls apart, the teenage Florens is sent alone to fetch a free Black man who knows herbal medicine. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of 2008.
Home
Frank Money, a 24-year-old Korean War veteran in the 1950s, carrying guilt over what he saw and did in the war, crosses a segregated country to rescue his younger sister Cee in Georgia. She has been working for a white doctor who has been experimenting on her body. Brother and sister end up back in Lotus, Georgia, the small town they both wanted to escape.
God Help the Child
Her last novel, set in the present day. Bride, a successful young woman in the cosmetics business, has very dark skin, and her light-skinned mother, Sweetness, gave her no affection as a child because of it. When her lover Booker leaves her, she goes after him, and the novel moves between the voices of the people whose childhoods have marked them.
In What Order to Read Toni Morrison
Morrison wrote no series, so every novel stands on its own. The only link is the loose trilogy of Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998), three books set in different periods of Black American history; read them in that order if you want the sequence.
Publication order shows her becoming more ambitious: the first three novels each tell one story, mostly in sequence, while from Beloved onwards the stories come in fragments and from many voices. That is why Song of Solomon is a better first book than Beloved. The later novels, A Mercy, Home and God Help the Child, are short and can be read in an evening or two.
A reading path
1. Song of Solomon (1977)
2. Sula (1973)
3. Beloved (1987)
4. Jazz (1992)
5. A Mercy (2008)
Everything Else Toni Morrison Published
Beyond the 11 key books: 22 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Essays and lectures
5
5 books · 1992–2019
- 1992Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imaginationher 1990 Massey Lectures at Harvard
- 1994The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993her Stockholm lecture on language
- 2008What Moves at the Marginselected nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard
- 2017The Origin of Othersher 2016 Norton Lectures at Harvard
- 2019The Source of Self-Regardessays, speeches and meditations, 1976–2013
Edited collections
3
3 books · 1992–2009
- 1992Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Poweressays on the Clarence Thomas hearings
- 1997Birth of a Nation’hoodessays on the O.J. Simpson case, co-edited
- 2009Burn This Bookwriters on censorship, for PEN
Short fiction
1
1 book · 1983
- 1983Recitatifa short story first printed in an anthology; published as a book in 2022 with an introduction by Zadie Smith
Plays and libretti
3
3 books · 1986–2012
- 1986Dreaming Emmetta play about Emmett Till, staged in 1986, never published
- 2005Margaret Garneropera libretto on the story behind Beloved
- 2012Desdemonaa response to Othello, with songs by Rokia Traoré; first staged in Vienna in 2011
Children’s books
10
10 books · 1999–2014
- 1999The Big Boxwith Slade Morrison
- 2002The Book of Mean Peoplewith Slade Morrison
- 2003The Ant or the Grasshopper?Who’s Got Game? fables, with Slade Morrison
- 2003The Lion or the Mouse?Who’s Got Game? fables, with Slade Morrison
- 2004Poppy or the Snake?Who’s Got Game? fables, with Slade Morrison
- 2004Remember: The Journey to School Integrationphotographs of school desegregation, with her text
- 2009Peeny Butter Fudgewith Slade Morrison
- 2010The Tortoise or the Harewith Slade Morrison
- 2010Little Cloud and Lady Windwith Slade Morrison
- 2014Please, Louisewith Slade Morrison
The years · 1931–2019
Quick facts about Toni Morrison
- Known for
- Novels about the inner lives of Black Americans, from slavery to the present, told in many voices and out of chronological order.
- 1931
- Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio
- 1970
- The Bluest Eye
- 1987
- Beloved
- 1993
- Nobel Prize in Literature
- 2012
- Presidential Medal of Freedom
- 2019
- Dies in New York, aged 88
- Born
- 18 February 1931, Lorain, Ohio, as Chloe Ardelia Wofford
- Education
- Howard University (BA, 1953); Cornell University (MA, 1955)
- Worked
- Editor at Random House, c. 1967–1983; professor at Princeton, 1989–2006
- Honours
- Pulitzer Prize (1988); Nobel Prize in Literature (1993); Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012)
- Married
- Harold Morrison, an architect, 1958–1964; two sons, Harold Ford and Slade
- Died
- 5 August 2019, Montefiore Medical Center, the Bronx, New York
The red mark is 1987: Beloved, the novel that won her the Pulitzer Prize.
How Toni Morrison Writes: Many Voices, Withheld Facts
Morrison rarely tells a story from beginning to end. The Bluest Eye moves between a child narrator and the histories of Pecola’s parents; Sula jumps from year to year between 1919 and 1965; Jazz is told by an unnamed narrator who circles the same murder from several angles. In Beloved the central event, what Sethe did when slave-catchers came to the house, is revealed only in pieces, long after the reader has met its consequences.
She often holds back a fact readers expect to be told. In her short story “Recitatif” one of the two girls is Black and one is white, and she never says which; Paradise opens with “They shoot the white girl first” and never identifies her. Her criticism makes the same point from the other side: in Playing in the Dark she argues that Black characters, however marginal, shaped how white American writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, Cather and Hemingway wrote.
Much of her fiction starts from history. Beloved began with a newspaper account of Margaret Garner in 1856; A Mercy goes back to the late seventeenth century, and Home to the medical abuse of Black women in the 1950s. She tells these stories through one family or one household rather than through public events. For writers who work in the same territory, from James Baldwin to Jesmyn Ward, see Authors like Toni Morrison.
Watch
Toni Morrison on Beloved, 1987
Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks with Morrison for PBS in 1987, just after Beloved was published, about the mother at the centre of the novel.
Frequently asked questions about Toni Morrison’s books
How many books did Toni Morrison write?
Eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015); all eleven are on this page. She also published five books of essays and lectures, including Playing in the Dark (1992) and The Source of Self-Regard (2019), edited three collections, wrote the short story “Recitatif”, three works for the stage and ten children’s books, nine of them with her son Slade.
What are Toni Morrison’s books in order?
The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012) and God Help the Child (2015).
Which Toni Morrison book should I read first?
Song of Solomon (1977): it tells one story, largely in order, and contains most of what she does best. Beloved is the most often recommended, but its broken structure and subject ask more of a first-time reader; read it second. If you want something short, start with The Bluest Eye.
What is Toni Morrison’s most famous book?
Beloved (1987). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, was filmed by Jonathan Demme in 1998 with Oprah Winfrey, and in 2006 a New York Times poll of writers and critics named it the best American fiction of the previous 25 years.
What is Beloved by Toni Morrison about?
Sethe, who escaped slavery in Kentucky, lives in Cincinnati in 1873 with her daughter Denver, in a house haunted by the baby daughter she killed rather than let her be taken back into slavery. When a young woman calling herself Beloved arrives, the past moves in with them. Morrison based it loosely on Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter in 1856.
What is A Mercy by Toni Morrison about?
It is set in late seventeenth-century America. Florens, an enslaved girl, is taken by the trader Jacob Vaark from a Maryland planter who owes him money, and joins his household on a farm in the north with his English wife Rebekka and Lina, a Native American woman. When the household falls apart, the teenage Florens is sent alone to find a free Black man who knows herbal medicine.
What did Toni Morrison win the Nobel Prize for?
She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first Black woman to receive it. The Swedish Academy described her as a writer “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”.
Why are Toni Morrison’s books banned?
The Bluest Eye and Beloved are among the books most often challenged in American schools, usually over sexual content and violence: the rape of Pecola by her father in The Bluest Eye, and the killing of a child in Beloved. The Bluest Eye was on the American Library Association’s list of the ten most challenged books in 2006, 2013, 2014, 2020 and 2022, and at least eleven American schools removed Beloved in the 2021–22 school year. In Virginia, a parent’s complaint about Beloved led to a state bill requiring parents to be told about sexually explicit books in class; Governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed it.
Did Toni Morrison go to Columbia?
No. She studied English at Howard University (BA, 1953) and Cornell University (MA, 1955). She taught at Texas Southern University, Howard, the State University of New York and Bard College, and from 1989 to 2006 held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton.
When was Toni Morrison born, and when did she die?
She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on 18 February 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. “Toni” came from Anthony, the name she took when she became a Catholic at twelve. She died on 5 August 2019 at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York, aged 88, of complications from pneumonia.
What was Toni Morrison’s real name?
Chloe Ardelia Wofford. Toni came from Anthony, the saint’s name she took when she became a Catholic at twelve, and Morrison from her husband, Harold Morrison. More writers who did the same are on my list of authors who wrote under pseudonyms.
Footnotes
- Toni Morrison — Wikipedia
- Beloved (novel) — Wikipedia
- Toni Morrison: Facts — NobelPrize.org
- Toni Morrison bibliography — Princeton University Library
- Paradise — Penguin Random House
- Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize speech — The Marginalian
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
— Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, Stockholm (7 December 1993)
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