Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is the most important American novelist since
Faulkner, the most significant American woman writer since Dickinson,
and the most widely read African American public intellectual of the
last half century. Her influence as a writer, critic, editor, teacher,
and scholar is profound: she changed the face of literature and literary
criticism in the US, if not worldwide. Yet despite the ever-expanding
field of Morrison scholarship, no book tracing her critical reception
has existed, until now. The book is as much a cultural history of
America as a reception history of an American writer. Morrison worked
brilliantly in many genres - fiction, of course (novels and short
stories); drama/staged performance; poetry; non-fiction on historical,
social, and political issues; and critical writings on the work of
others and on her own work. She generated a literary-critical
methodology that recognizes and embraces rather than ignores the African
American presence in US literature, and thus transformed American
academics' attitude toward American letters. The story of Morrison's
achievement in making a home for herself - and for other women and
people of color - in the stony bedrock of "white male" American
literature is the subject of this book.