The Bluest Eye was Morrison's debut novel, published when she was 40 years old. Though it did not get immediate attention, it is undoubtedly Morrison's most intimately personal work, as it is set in Lorain County, where she grew up. This debut novel follows a little Black girl named Pecola as she grows up in Morrison's hometown of Lorain, Ohio, in the years following the Great Depression.

Pecola is often taunted about her dark complexion, hair, and eyes, which makes her want for the white qualities she considers more attractive, such as blonde hair, bright eyes, and pale skin. However, while the young girl prays for the miracle of blue eyes, her personal life takes a tragic turn. Morrison boldly proclaims the issues that would power her extended career, literary jet fuel, from racial strife to sexual abuse to her characters' inner problems.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/11337.The_Bluest_Eye

Morrison's second novel continued her habit of highlighting the lives of individuals who are frequently overlooked or rejected by mainstream society, notably the two black women from the low-income Ohio neighborhood The Bottom who form the core connection at the heart of Sula. This fascinating and emotional tale follows the lives of two black heroines from their close-knit infancy in a tiny Ohio town to their eventual confrontation and reconciliation.

Nel Wright has decided to remain in her hometown, marry, establish a family, and become a cornerstone of the black community. Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has chosen for herself, enrolling in college and immersing herself in city life. She returns to her roots as a rebel and a ruthless seductress. Both ladies will have to face the repercussions of their decisions at some point. Together, they provide a vivid vision of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/11346.Sula

Morrison's third book, and one of her most ambitious, was this one. The book tells the story of Macon "Milkman" Dead, who grows up in the industrial Midwest against the backdrop of the Great Depression and then travels through Pennsylvania and Virginia to forge his own identity. It is a stylistic tour de force that stretches across literary genres, creating a dizzying tapestry of historical fiction and magical realism. The book is also regularly prohibited in schools and is a favorite of former President Barack Obama.

Milkman Dead was formed immediately after a local eccentric threw himself over a rooftop in a futile attempt to fly. He, too, will spend the rest of his life attempting to fly. Toni Morrison, like Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, transforms the coming-of-age tale in this superbly envisioned work. Morrison introduces a complete cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the denizens of a fully formed dark universe as she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the land of his family's roots.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/11334.Song_of_Solomon

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved is a mesmerizing and dazzlingly creative picture of a woman plagued by her past. Sethe was born a slave and fled to Ohio, but she is still not free eighteen years later. She has survived the unfathomable and has not gone insane, but she is continually haunted by thoughts of Sweet Home, the lovely property where so many heinous things occurred. Meanwhile, Sethe's home has long been haunted by the furious, destructive spirit of her kid, who died without a name and whose tombstone has just the word "Beloved".

She tries hard to keep the past at bay, yet it continues to be heard and felt in her memories and in the lives of those around her. Sethe's tragic secret spills into the present when a mysterious adolescent girl comes calling herself Beloved. Morrison's memorable novel is one of the great and lasting masterpieces of American literature, combining the visionary force of legend with the unshakable reality of history.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/6149.Beloved

While not as straightforward as her other works, Jazz — Morrison's follow-up to Beloved, which is comprised of vignettes from one troubled couple's life set against the backdrop of 1920s Harlem — is eminently readable, thanks in large part to Morrison's masterful command of world-building. It's difficult not to be drawn into the brutal and dizzying world of the two young lovers at the center of Morrison's tale.

Joe Trace, a middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty goods, shoots his adolescent girlfriend to death in the winter of 1926 when everyone everywhere sees nothing but bright things ahead. Violet, Joe's wife, assaults the girl's body at the burial. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession transports back and forth in time as a narrative is pieced together from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep truths of black urban existence.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/37398.Jazz

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now presents a sophisticated, elegant, and eloquent work of literary criticism that promises to revolutionize the way read American literature while also opening a new chapter in the American discourse on race. Toni Morrison's remarkable examinations of the "Africanist" presence in the literature of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway result in a radical reconsideration of the key qualities of the literary past.

She demonstrates how much the concepts of freedom and individuality, manhood and innocence, were dependent on the existence of a clearly unfree black population—which came to serve white authors as avatars of their own anxieties and ambitions. Unlike the other books on this list, this is not a novel; rather, it is a collection of three lectures Morrison gave at Harvard in the early 1990s, in which she discusses the various ways white writers pushed the African-American experience to the margins in order to establish a collective American literary identity.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/37405.Playing_in_the_Dark

Morrison's first short tale, first published in 1983 and reissued in hardback last month, is a formal experiment that simultaneously satisfies and defies the expectations, a chess game she's destined to win. Twyla and Roberta are "dumped" as 8-year-olds at a home for runaway and orphan girls for four months; as Twyla writes, "my mother danced all night and Roberta's was sick".

They are hapless puppets toward the bottom of the social pecking order at St. Bonaventure, just above Maggie, the silent, crippled kitchen help. But Morrison has a trick up her sleeve: one of the girls in white, and the other is black, and Morrison jumbles their racial identities via a sequence of actions that disrupt historical hierarchies and simplistic binaries. When the girls rejoin as women, they set out to discover the truth about what happened all those years ago.

Zadie Smith provides an insightful, startling introduction, highlighting the author's obligations on herself, pushing outside her comfort zone while ceaselessly campaigning for "the African American culture out of which and toward which Morrison works".

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/34842610-recitatif

The most acclaimed and beloved writer of the time has released a new nonfiction book, a rich compilation of essays, lectures, and thoughts on society, culture, and art spanning four decades. The Source of Self-Regard is overflowing with Toni Morrison's innate refinement of thought and language, literary talent, and moral compass. It is broken into three sections: the first begins with a powerful prayer for the 9/11 victims, the second with a probing reflection on Martin Luther King Jr., and the third with a heartbreaking eulogy for James Baldwin.

Morrison addresses contentious societal themes in the writings and speeches included here, including the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "black matter(s)", and human rights. She examines persistent cultural issues such as the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and the power of language itself in her Nobel address. And there's an incisive commentary on her own work (including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise) as well as the work of others, including painter and collage artist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars. Overall, The Source of Self-Regard is a brilliant and necessary contribution to Toni Morrison's oeuvre.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/40265834-the-source-of-self-regard

God Help the Child, Morrison's first novel set in the twenty-first century, addresses the issue of colorism. Bride, the main character, is a beautiful and confident dark-skinned lady, but her looks drive her fairer-skinned mother to withhold affection and instead mistreat her. Morrison dives deeper into the difficulties that exist between mothers and daughters, the rifts that lie in even the most personal relationships.

God Help the Child is a heartbreaking novel about how childhood trauma affects and misshapes an adult's life. It is spare and unsparing. At the heart of the story is a woman named Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one aspect of her beauty, boldness, confidence, and success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the most basic forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose repercussions refuse to fade.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/23602473-god-help-the-child

Toni Morrison, America's most acclaimed novelist, and Nobel Prize laureate, deepens her profound take on our history with her twentieth-century drama of redemption: a tense and painful story of one man's desperate quest for himself in a war-torn globe. Frank Money is a vengeful, self-loathing Korean War veteran who, after harrowing experiences on the front lines, returns to racist America with more than just physical wounds.

His home may appear foreign to him, but the desire to rescue his medically tortured younger sister and return her to the little Georgia town he's detested his whole life shakes him out of his crushing lethargy. As Frank revisits his childhood and war experiences that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers tremendous courage he thought he'd never have again. A very affecting tale about a seemingly defeated man rediscovering his masculinity - and his home.

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/13152998-home