Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison, 1977
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400033423
In Brief
Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly.
With this novel, Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. (From the publisher.)
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Toni Morrison 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.
Song of Solomon (1977) 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) Paradise (1998), explores both the need for and the impossibility of real community and the bonds that both unite and divide African-American women. (Also from the publisher.)