Morrison, ToniOverview
Publication Timeline
Most widely held works about
Toni Morrison
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Most widely held works by
Toni Morrison
Beloved : a novel
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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257 editions published between 1987 and 2013 in 4 languages and held by 12,561 WorldCat member libraries worldwide After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade. A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story ... read it and tremble. At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyones future
The bluest eye
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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195 editions published between 1970 and 2013 in 3 languages and held by 10,038 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's prosperous black families, as well as its white families, Pecola lives with her alcoholic father and embittered, overworked mother in a shabby two-room storefront that reeks of the hopeless destitution that overwhelms their lives. In awe of her clean well-groomed schoolmates, and certain of her own intense ugliness, Pecola tries to make herself disappear as she wishes fervently, desperately for the blue eyes of a white girl. In her afterward to this novel, Morrison writes of the little girl she once knew: "Beauty was not simply something to behold, it was something one could do. The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that; to say something about why she had not, or possibly never would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. And twenty-years later I was still wondering about how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak that what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her."
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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165 editions published between 1977 and 2013 in 3 languages and held by 8,736 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Four generations of black life in America
Sula
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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196 editions published between 1973 and 2013 in 12 languages and held by 8,242 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Two African American women, Sula and Nel, were life-long friends who grew up in a small, poor Ohio town until Sula left for the big city and returned years later to find that she and Nel are worlds apart
Paradise
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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77 editions published between 1997 and 2013 in 3 languages and held by 6,149 WorldCat member libraries worldwide This story set in Ruby, Oklahoma is about an African American community
Jazz
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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110 editions published between 1991 and 2013 in 4 languages and held by 6,030 WorldCat member libraries worldwide In Harlem, 1926, Joe Trace, a door-to-door salemsan in his fifties, kills his teenage lover. At the funeral, his wife Violet slashes the dead girl's face and then desperately searches to find why Joe was unfaithful. The profound love story is immersed in the sights and sounds of Black urban life during the Jazz Age
Tar baby
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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131 editions published between 1981 and 2013 in 4 languages and held by 5,720 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Winner of the 1978 National Book Critic's Circle Award for fiction. "Beautiful and satisfying ... an unusually wise and large-spirited book ... consistently picturesque, charged with startling images".--Baltimore Sun
A mercy
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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60 editions published between 2008 and 2013 in English and Undetermined and held by 5,230 WorldCat member libraries worldwide In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith, in a novel set in late seventeenth-century America
Love
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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55 editions published between 2003 and 2013 in English and held by 4,700 WorldCat member libraries worldwide 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
Home
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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34 editions published between 2012 and 2013 in English and held by 4,052 WorldCat member libraries worldwide This book tells the story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister. Frank Money is an angry, broken veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. He is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from that he's hated all his life
Playing in the dark : whiteness and the literary imagination
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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32 editions published between 1990 and 1993 in English and held by 3,327 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest." Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature--individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
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Recording
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40 editions published between 1988 and 2008 in 3 languages and held by 2,083 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this ... novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. -Back cover
Race-ing justice, en-gendering power : essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the construction of social reality
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7 editions published between 1992 and 1993 in English and held by 2,011 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
Beloved
by Jonathan Demme
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Visual
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28 editions published between 1991 and 2011 in 6 languages and held by 1,853 WorldCat member libraries worldwide After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved". Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things start to happen
The bluest eye
by Toni Morrison
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Recording
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22 editions published between 1970 and 2011 in English and No Linguistic content and held by 1,672 WorldCat member libraries worldwide An eleven-year-old black girl prays for her eyes to turn blue so people will consider her beautiful
Sula
by Toni Morrison
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Recording
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29 editions published between 1973 and 2009 in English and Undetermined and held by 1,556 WorldCat member libraries worldwide At the heart of Sula is a bond between to women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injuries. Sula and Nel are both black, both smart, and both poor. Through their girlhood years, they share everything. All this changes when Sula gets out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where there hides a fierce resentment at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped
A mercy [a novel]
by Toni Morrison
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Recording
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15 editions published between 2008 and 2009 in English and held by 1,479 WorldCat member libraries worldwide In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith
Home [a novel]
by Toni Morrison
(
Recording
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9 editions published in 2012 in English and held by 1,294 WorldCat member libraries worldwide "The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister"--
Love
by Toni Morrison
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Recording
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18 editions published between 2003 and 2011 in English and held by 1,249 WorldCat member libraries worldwide May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey's Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is either the void in, or the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces - a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial. This audacious exploration into the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread - is rich in characters, striking scenes, and a profound understanding of how alive the past can be. [This novel is an] addition to the canon of one of the world's literary masters. -Dust jacket
The big box
by Toni Morrison
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Book
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17 editions published between 1999 and 2003 in 5 languages and held by 1,207 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Because they do not abide by the rules written by the adults around them, three children are judged unable to handle their freedom and forced to live in a box with three locks on the door more
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Audience Level
 Related IdentitiesAssociated Subjects
African American families African American girls African Americans African Americans as literary characters African Americans--Social conditions African American veterans African American women African American women as literary characters American fiction American fiction--Women authors American literature--White authors Brothers and sisters Caribbean Area City and town life Communal living Crimes of passion Death Faulkner, William, Female friendship Fugitives from justice Funeral rites and ceremonies Georgia Girls Hotelkeepers Infanticide Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) Interracial adoption Korean War (1950-1953) Literature Michigan Middle-aged persons Morrison, Toni Mother and child in literature Motherhood in literature Mothers as literary characters New York (State)--New York--Harlem Ohio Oklahoma Psychoanalysis and literature Quests (Expeditions) Racism Retirees Rich people Seaside resorts Slavery Triangles (Interpersonal relations) United States Veterans Women and literature Women slaves
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Alternative Names
Morison, Toni
Morisone, Tonija, 1931-
Morrison, Chloe Anthony
Morrison, Chloe Anthony, 1931-
Morrison, Tony, književnica
Morrisonová, Toni.
Mūrīsūn, Tūnī, 1931-
Wofford, Chloe A. 1931-
Wofford, Chloe Anthony.
Wofford, Chloe Anthony, 1931-
Wofford, Chloe Anthony 1931- Wirklicher Name
Wofford, Chloe Ardellia 1931-
Моррисон, Тони, 1931-
מוריסון, טוני
توني موريسون، 1931-
モリスン, トニ
モリソン, トニ
Languages
English
(1,450)
French (36) Spanish (22) Danish (14) Italian (8) Dutch (5) German (4) Finnish (3) Chinese (2) Arabic (2) Albanian (1) Persian (1) Greek, Modern (1) Portuguese (1) Multiple languages (1) Korean (1) Covers
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