Preface

In July 2008 I went to Charleston, South Carolina, for the conference of the Toni Morrison Society. The driver of my taxi from the airport erupted in enthusiasm when she heard where I was going. When she found out the program was to include Morrison reading from her not-yet-published novel A Mercy, she told me she would find a way to be in that theater herself. It is to state the obvious to say that not every Nobel Prize–winning author of complex, difficult novels, not every university professor who has produced critical work of broad and enduring intellectual significance, is held in this kind of esteem. There is something different about Toni Morrison.

Author of ten novels to date, Morrison has been translated into twenty-six languages. She has been a Newsweek cover; she is an institution on “Oprah’s Book Club”; and she has honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford and the Sorbonne. Her unique, challenging, and passionately political depictions of African-American experience are studied in high schools and colleges, discussed by reading groups and debated in all media, and published on by scholars at an astounding rate.