Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare...

Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, grows up in "his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother" and with his friend Guitar who is connected to the secret avengers called the Seven Days, falls in love with his cousin Hagar, learns from bootlegging Aunt Pilate, and then heads south, lured by the promise of buried gold and the mysteries of his heritage.

In the 1680s the slave trade in America is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older...

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.

Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the Black community and Sula has become...

The epitome of a group of women's ideals about love, fatherhood, and friendship, wealthy hotel owner Bill Cosey finds his life compromised by his troubled past and his feelings about a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

In this 1983 short story about race and the relationships that shape us through life, Twyla and Roberta, friends since childhood who are seemingly at opposite ends of every problem as they grow older, cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.