Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Bluest Eye | 1970 |
| Sula | 1973 |
| Song of Solomon | 1977 |
| Tar Baby | 1981 |
| Beloved | 1987 |
| Jazz | 1992 |
| Paradise | 1998 |
| Love | 2003 |
| A Mercy | 2008 |
| Home | 2012 |
| God Help the Child | 2015 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Recitatif | 1983 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| The Big Box (With: Slade Morrison) | 1999 |
| The Book of Mean People (With: Slade Morrison) | 2002 |
| Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? (With: Slade Morrison) | 2003 |
| Who’s Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse? (With: Slade Morrison) | 2003 |
| Who’s Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? (With: Slade Morrison) | 2003 |
| Remember: The Journey to School Integration | 2004 |
| Peeny Butter Fudge (With: Slade Morrison) | 2009 |
| Little Cloud and Lady Wind (With: Slade Morrison) | 2010 |
| The Tortoise or the Hare (With: Slade Morrison) | 2010 |
| Please, Louise (With: Slade Morrison) | 2014 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination | 1992 |
| The Dancing Mind | 1996 |
| What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction | 2008 |
| The Origin of Others | 2017 |
| The Source of Self-Regard / Mouth Full of Blood | 2019 |
| Goodness and the Literary Imagination | 2019 |
| The Measure of Our Lives | 2019 |
| Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon | 2026 |
About Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on 18 February 1931; died 5 August 2019) was an American novelist and editor who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her eleven novels, which include “The Bluest Eye”, “Song of Solomon” and the Pulitzer Prize winner “Beloved”, deal with Black American life and the consequences of racism in the United States.
Morrison was the second of four children in a working-class family. She took a BA in English at Howard University in 1953 and an MA at Cornell in 1955, then taught at Texas Southern University and at Howard. She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, in 1958; they had two sons and divorced in 1964. From 1965 she worked as an editor for a textbook division of Random House in Syracuse, and two years later moved to its New York City office, where she became the first Black woman senior editor in the fiction department.
“The Bluest Eye” grew out of a short story about a Black girl who longs for blue eyes and was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was 39. “Sula” (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. “Song of Solomon” (1977) brought national attention, was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. “Tar Baby” followed in 1981, and she left publishing in 1983.
“Beloved” (1987) was inspired by Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped and killed her young daughter when slave hunters caught up with her. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was filmed in 1998 by Jonathan Demme, with Oprah Winfrey as Sethe. With “Jazz” (1992) and “Paradise” it is sometimes called the Beloved trilogy. Morrison was the first Black woman of any nationality to receive the Nobel Prize.
She held a chair in the humanities at Princeton from 1989 until she retired in 2006. Her later novels were “Love” (2003), “A Mercy” (2008), “Home” (2012) and “God Help the Child” (2015), and she wrote children’s books with her younger son Slade, who died in 2010. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and died in New York at the age of 88. “Language as Liberation”, a book drawn from her Princeton lectures on the American canon, was published in February 2026.
Photo: Angela Radulescu, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).