African American and African Literature

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) became, in 1993, the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Before her own novels brought her acclaim — including Song of Solomon (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award — Morrison worked for nearly two decades as an editor at Random House, where she championed and helped publish a generation of Black writers, including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and an autobiography by Muhammad Ali. Her fiction is centrally concerned with African American history, community, and interior life, rendered with a lyrical, often nonlinear prose style influenced by oral storytelling traditions.